Participatory sculpture installation featuring built garden bed under a catwalk

Kaitlin Pomerantz and Zya S. Levy/WE THE WEEDS

with help from Gregory Charnock, Sarah Finestone

2013

From Press Release: 

Urban dwellers may consider themselves far from the throes of nature’s whims and schemes, but could it be that as we bike, walk and traverse the concrete streets, we are enacting the regenerative will of a variety of highly-adaptive, resilient, and opportunistic plant species? Might it be that lodged in the grips of our sneakers and the cuffs of our pants, are the seeds of Philadelphia’s abundant wild urban flora, using us as their dispersive vectors?

Following an experiment wherein Charles Darwin cultivated 80 plants from a ball of mud stuck to a wounded French partridge’s leg, British botanist Sir Edward Salisbury (1886-1978) famously grew an entire garden from the botanical debris collected in his trouser cuffs. WE THE WEEDS team Kaitlin Pomerantz and Zya Levy invite the citizens of Philadelphia to join the investigation by stepping up onto the catwalk of our gallery nursery, shaking out your shoes, and noticing what grows. Let us see if we are indeed “peripatetic censor mechanisms, scattering seeds as we walk about” that Salisbury claimed us to be.

For more: practicegallery.org