Abstract
This article and the accompanying media essay describe my experience developing and implementing the collaborative, interdisciplinary art project The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory (Lawn Lab). Combining urban ecology, socially engaged art, and multispecies pedagogy, Lawn Lab takes what I define as a critical, ecosocial approach to environmental art. As a public, socially engaged project, it provides a framework for establishing rewilding interventions in institutional and residential lawns from seeds lying dormant in the soil. Focusing on Lawn Lab’s inaugural season, I describe how the project grew out of the Next Epoch Seed Library (NESL), an artist-run organization I cofounded in 2014 to collect, store, and share the seeds of spontaneous urban plants (a.k.a. weeds). After contextualizing NESL and Lawn Lab as part of a larger community of practitioners who work with vegetal attunement and entanglement in urban and disturbed landscapes, I describe the project’s implementation and progress over its first season. I close by connecting my experience implementing the first season of Lawn Lab to Georgina Born and Andrew Barry’s concept of the public experiment, part of their framework for analyzing how knowledge is produced through public-facing, interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art and science. I use this framework to explore how Lawn Lab provides a forum for imagining and enacting new possibilities around landscape maintenance and care, urban biodiversity, and public health, offering collaboration with weedy plants as one means of working toward ecological justice in the face of a protracted environmental crisis.
Highlights
This article and the accompanying media essay describe my experience developing and implementing the collaborative, interdisciplinary art project The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory (Lawn Lab)
I brush my palm over rough tips of freshly trimmed grass stems and leaves—Kentucky bluegrass, probably—and wonder how recently it was treated with herbicide
She works in a variety of media, from video to workshops to rewilding experiments, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with other earth systems
Summary
The vignette above describes a key moment in the founding season of the Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory (Lawn Lab). This community of practice is composed of artists who, in my view, take a critical, ecosocial approach to art making that emphasizes plant-human entanglement With this context established, I turn to a more in-depth discussion of the pilot season of Lawn Lab, including our motivations for creating the project and the process through which it was realized. As NESL has evolved over the past four years—branching out to include deep time seed burial projects and seed redistribution networks—we have retained a commitment to working in habitats described variously as postindustrial, disturbed, and ruderal.1 These sites are being recognized as lively zones full of novel ecological relationships, providing insights into how ecosystems might evolve under extreme environmental conditions (Hobbs, Higgs, and Hall 2013; Stoetzer 2018). In dialogue with a rich history of lawn-disrupting artistic practices, we offer our version: a series of rewilding interventions in institutional and residential lawns that centers plant agency by activating seeds lying dormant in the soil.[3]
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