VERTICAL GARDEN — CANADIAN THISTLE — A PROHIBITED PLANT IN NYC.
The project is inspired by the Canadian thistle, a plant prohibited in New York State due to its invasive nature. The propagation, transport, and sale of this species are prohibited by law. The term “invasive” describes plants that are considered not to be natural residents of a given environment.
The work centers on concepts such as foreign soil, immigration, borders and territories, invasiveness and control, and how these dynamics shape urban nature and landscape. Within this context, the Canadian thistle operates as a form of counterplay to human control, asserting its own agency within regulated and managed environments.
Overall, the project asks whether it is possible to cultivate an affective agriculture based on nature’s own forces, functioning as a Vera Icon in opposition to the political landscape. Historically, the Vera Icon refers to an image not made by human hands—an imprint or trace believed to emerge through direct contact rather than representation. In this project, the concept is reactivated to propose an image-making practice grounded in contact, imprint, and material agency, where the plant’s form and behavior inscribe themselves rather than being fully authored or controlled. The thistle thus becomes a nonhuman image-maker, producing traces that resist symbolic domestication and instead testify to nature’s capacity to mark territory, persist, and appear on its own terms.
Through processes of transcription, the plant is first fractalized into woodcut prints, which are then further dissected into geometric elements and assembled into a geometric wall composition. This translation moves between organic growth and abstract order, echoing the tension between natural forces and systems of regulation that the work seeks to address.