Abstract

This thesis examines how contemporary artists in the territory currently known as Canada engage vegetal matter as both primary source material and collaborator in place-based practices. It focuses on the practices of Anita Cazzola, Ginnifer Menominee, and Anahita Norouzi, who mobilize plants in acts of resistance that preserve cultural memory. It argues that these works can be understood through the lens of craft as a decolonial and interspecies method of knowing and making with living matter, showing how these artists challenge colonial categorizations of plants that have historically stigmatized “undesired” species in ways that echo processes of othering applied to human populations.
Drawing on craft theory, Indigenous decolonial thought, and new materialist approaches, this thesis positions plant-based artistic practices as forms of embodied knowledge that foreground material agency. It demonstrates how the seasonal, attentive labour of working with vegetal matter resists its reduction to inert resource.
Divided into three sections, the thesis first traces how modern botany participated in the colonization of sensory and relational engagements with the vegetal world, contributing to forms of ecological violence. The second section examines how craft-based practices offer a response to this history by attending to the instability and temporality of foraged and cultivated plants. The third section considers the paradox of exhibiting living or once-living matter within museum and gallery spaces, arguing that while such contexts attempt to fix plants in time, the works retain relational histories that exceed institutional containment and function as forms of counter-archive.