Poison Me Slowly
2023, produced during a DYCP funded research trip to India
Found fertiliser packaging and gloss paint. A series of 15.
This work was conceived and created, while in my family village of Mazara Dingrian in Hoshiarpur, Punjab. Inspired by a 3 week course and residency I’d just completed at Navdanya Biodiversity Farm, with Dr Vandana Shiva. Navdanya is an Earth Centric, women centric, and farmer led movement for the protection of biological and cultural diversity, and is located in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, near the Himalayan foothills.
The work uses agricultural fertiliser packaging that I collected from a few houses in my paternal village (including our own). I then took them to the village sign writer, to write 3 very carefully selected words on them.
Our village is a rural village, and our family and many other families in the village are farmers. Farmers, that since the green revolution arrived in India, have suffered severe soil degradation, diminishing access to water, political targeting, ill health, soaring debt, and tragic loss of life by suicide.
These intensive farming techniques that are reliant on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, fossil fuel powered machinery, and large quantities of water, have created a degenerative cycle that is very difficult to break.
This same pattern is visible in the marketing efforts and consumption patterns in consumer food. The bright and shiny logos, packaging, and ads, hypnotise us to be complicit in our own poisoning. We know it's not good for us, but we can't seem to help but feed the machine.
It isn't accidental. It's very deliberate. It isn't about our health and happiness. It's about their wealth and their control.
'Poison Me Slowly' is my way to explore this complex relationship between the illusion of choice, colonisation of the body, self-destruction, and care. It is born of love and a longing to return to more harmonious and ecologically natural times.
What’s your poison?