Prudence Gibson’s The Plant Contract: art’s return to vegetal life, argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.

Brill Rudopi

Gibson discusses several of my works in The Plant Contract including Somatic Drifts and Scent of Sydney.

“Eco-punk Australian artist, Cat Jones completely dismantles our perceptions of plants in her performance experience. Her concepts of plant life in us, rather than behind us or in front of us, are a queering. Jones disrupts our sensory perceptions and adjusts our sexual self-identities. She does, this by transforming our bodies, from man to woman, human to plant. The transgender, trans-species model of her work fits within an aesthetic of queer play, as well as the associated politics.” p 115

Gibson PA, 2018, The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life, Brill Rodopi,  http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004360549

From Series: Critical Plant Studies, Volume: 3