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Plant Science

Plant Science was a creative research project with my professional partner Christopher Heighes (also Roehampton) that examined the performative legacy of redundant teaching and learning spaces and how their material nature informs contemporary processes of creative and pedagogical exchange. The project chose to investigate the former Department of Plant Sciences, King’s College, in South London, using a phenomenological approach to determine how the physical and sensory environment of the abandoned scientific laboratories and glasshouses act upon the individual and their experience of study - experiences that are not easily included in the scope of conventional archives and established memory practices. The aim was to challenge received curatorial modes to create an experiential artwork that could unlock the potentialities of the dormant site and reconnect it with the modern university. The project extracted three teaching environments from their original location and reconstructed them as freestanding architectonic devices within the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House, London (May-June 2013). Forster and Heighes’s installation, commissioned by King’s Cultural Institute with support from the Performance Foundation, was designed to act as a point of interruption, a crafted hiatus where objects and substances from the university’s past actively occupy the present. The work, arranged over five spaces, used the conceit of an auction viewing day and the accompanying free catalogue and contextual film allowed objective encounters with oft overlooked fixtures and fittings. When counterpointed with engraved texts and kinetic elements, these formed a layered system of informational exchange, an interactive experience that spoke to questions of value, provenance, disposal, and institutional identity. The installation hosted a seminar on ‘Plant Thinking’ by Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy Michael Marder and research materials were also exhibited at the 3rd Art and Science International Exhibition and Symposium at The Museum of Science and Technology, University of Tsinghua, Beijing in 2012.