Caring for the Rubble Species: The Crucial Work of Transforming the Maintained into the Unmanageable
Eradicate: a past participle of the Latin verb ērādīcō. The first sound ē, meaning “from,” and the second rādīx, meaning “root.” I annihilate. I root out. Eradicate: a word that means specifically to destroy the nature of what it seeks. This is settler-colonialism at work in the English language — disrespect and destruction of the natural world in the etymology of an everyday word.
The salve for these harsh truths is recognizing that the natural world has always ruthlessly fought domination. It continues to flourish because of the richness and complexity behind its major defence system against the functions of colonialism: biodiversity. Earth’s diverse flora and fauna embody all sorts of creative identities — colours that elude the human eye, genders that expand beyond scientific terminology, defence mechanisms honed over hundreds of generations.
One common example of these rebellious biological systems are weeds, or as I’d like to focus on more specifically, ruderal species. A ruderal species — from the Latin “rudus” (rubble) — is any hardy plant species that is able to adapt to disturbed land and prosper there. These swaths of plants appear without human assistance and take over construction sites, forest clearings, and parking lots across the world. They introduce a warm richness to the capitalist’s dream of a built and maintained environment. I admire their will to dismantle the binary of commercial space versus wilderness, private versus public space, control versus imagination. Ruderal species work to build large networks, and most have wide geographical distributions — wild carrots, for example, have extraordinary survival skills and grow across North America, Asia, and Europe.
These rubble species embody the unmanageable and steadfast quality of the wild. They overcome domination with creativity, diversity, and resilience. It wasn’t until I read the following phrase by author Richard Mabey that I fully understood the solidarity between artists and our plant friends:
Weeds may be holding the bruised parts of the planet from falling apart.[1]
Like weeds, marginalized artists are doing the crucial work of holding tender things together and transforming otherwise void spaces into rich scenes of storytelling, respite, care, joy, and beauty. When I draw this comparison, many DIY, LGTBQIA2S+, and BIPOC artists come to mind. Mount Allison alumna, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, is one of them. She is a Wolastoqwiw visual artist, curator, author, and educator from Neqotkuk, also known as Tobique First Nation (New Brunswick), whose work ranges from digital illustration and painted murals to beadwork. She is also a diligent researcher, and, through our communication, I learned how her inclination to create politically charged artwork grew the more she read about Indigenous social and political histories. Hassencahl-Perley’s colourful, exuberant murals take inspiration from Wabanaki iconography and beadwork imagery and have been installed provincially and internationally. Amongst her murals, you’ll find repeated, Wabanaki double curve motifs, which are not normally rendered at such a large scale. The bold curves seem to form the natural hearth of her paintings, surrounded by celestial bodies, plants, local animals, and family life. It’s clear that these murals are influenced by, and meant to uplift, Emma’s community, family, and nation. Her joyful explosions of pattern and texture completely transform the concrete and drywall to which they are bonded. At the same time, her linework is precise and her narratives intimate, reflecting the care and attention she instills in the spaces she shapes.
I wanted to ask Hassencahl-Perley how she was able to care for herself and the stories she carries with her, specifically during her time making art in an institution. In her response to this question, I noticed how her confidence grew over time, and I gained an understanding that her work is both evolving and steadfast. She wrote to me:
I had difficulty coping with how others would perceive and receive my work. Over time, I had to learn to stand by it but still be open and receptive to correction and suggestions to clarify my messages. I would tell Indigenous art students and emerging artists that failure and critique are vast components of being an artist; be gentle with yourself through some of the negative. At the same time, be open to failure and critique.
Artists creating interventions in digital spaces also enrich their environment like weeds. Brody Weaver is a visual artist, emerging art historian, and media art scholar, who leads queer and trans programming in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She invites community participation into her research, filmmaking, and archiving practices. I asked Weaver about the importance of creating supportive networks online, where youth turn when their home lives or institutional surroundings lack the equitable and safe environment they need. I wanted to know how her work reaches people who are most in need of community. Weaver wrote in response:
As a trans woman, it is a deeply meaningful experience for me to engage with the writing, visual art, and media made by other trans women. As a community educator and youth worker, I understand how and why it is critically important for youth to have social and political spaces to build community and identity outside of adult interference and surveillance. When people land on my work in the digital sphere, I hope that they find something they did not realise they were looking for — when I was twenty years old, I collaborated with some friends to mount archival material from a queer archive in Kjipuktuk across the city and on a digital website, and our intention was just this — creating spaces of access to histories, information, and political practises which viewers might be able to find accidentally. This pursuit makes me think of metadata in libraries and archives — describing something with some intentional keywords so that it will appear as a search result for someone who was not intending to find it, but needs it. Someone once described this to me as a love letter to the future.
As an archivist of tangible material and digital media, Brody dismantles the binary between digital and physical space. In her work, the two are constantly at play with each other, mirrored in Brody’s printed matter and installation work, which often features text conversations and screenshots. In Brody’s project (un)becoming: a digital participatory queer archive (2019), she collected materials gathered by anonymous participants through the community-based archiving site HistoryPin. Flicking through the materials on her website, I smiled at the non-hierarchical collage of film photos, intimate stories, sketches, and precious objects. I am inspired by the way Brody’s work is radically inclusionary, shapeshifting when required in order to be accessible in a wide variety of media. While she strives to bring queer stories to the public, nothing is more evident than the ethics of care in her work. She wrote to me:
Having just completed a community-based documentary on trans people and their relationship(s) to healthcare, together we’ve made the decision not to put the film online. This decreases its accessibility but created a space of trust that allowed the project to become what it needed to. It is a balancing act, I think, and I am still learning with each project I’m involved in.
Works of art like Weaver’s and Hassencahl-Perley’s bring a rebellious inclusion into public space. Even more so, despite the limitations the capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchal landscape tries to assign them as they continue to grow their practices. One last characteristic of a ruderal species is that their spontaneous nature makes them impossible to eradicate. There will always be an unlikely grouping of dandelions at home on the sidewalk, or a single unassuming brick covered gently by moss. The only question that remains is: How are you caring for the creative folks bringing diversity into your life?
— Flora Chubbs, 2023
[1] Richard Mabey, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
Flora Chubbs (@flloramay) is an artist, writer, woodworker, and anarchist residing in Toronto, Ontario. She is of Inuit and settler ancestry, living and creating between NunatuKavut territory in Labrador, and St. John’s, Newfoundland. She received her Diploma in Textile Arts from the College of the North Atlantic (2018) and she is a recent graduate of the Honours Bachelor of Craft and Design, Furniture program at Sheridan College. Flora has led various youth programs ranging from weaving to hand embroidery, and she assists in creating arts curricula for grades K-6. She has led adult workshops in quilting and embroidery at galleries and Indigenous community centres. Manifested in her community work, Flora’s goal is to produce craft while creating a safe and exciting space for Indigenous youth to create and enjoy art.
