We are given a couple of futuristic images from ‘nature’ along with their textual accompaniments. The first image, the footnote suggests, depicts the ‘Flavr Savr Tomato’, perhaps some sort of genetically engineered concoction; and the second, an ancient-looking, metallically-coloured birch tree, in an ‘otherwise fixed position’, behaving in a constrained and restless manner. The fruit-vegetable and the tree are captioned with specific latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates (especially amusing, in the case of the ‘domestic’ tomatoes), conferring onto them an exactitude in geographical space and time.[1]

Accordingly, two striking things that come together in Orchid’s diptychs are turbulence and an odd kind of constraint. In the tomatoes piece, activist words like ‘propel’ and the 7-times repeated ‘call’ offset words like ‘hold’ and ‘prolong’ and ‘soft firming’. These in turn embrace organic phrases like ‘wet innards’ and ‘sweetness of the rot’—an ongoing contrariness cradled within the notion of ‘kin’ (7-times). In the birch piece the same theme of kinship (plus 5-times) is again prominent. Here futurism’s ‘primal past’ promises an originary, unsullied connection. The tangible fixture of the tree secures it as a giver and sustainer of life (‘lung walking, adventurous roots shoot’).

The prose is at once forthright and scientific (witness the range of delectable quotations grafted onto the main trunk of the birch text). Orchid allows precision and connectedness and unease to speak as poetry.

Unforgettably, the tree’s very restiveness holds the floor and its rootedness permits a searching out of genetic retrieval—or rehabilitation: in place of a rebalanced ‘Flavr Savr’, here ‘Refusing kin’s stasis’ encourages ‘desire’ to open up—if not ransack—various inherited boundary limits. One such sees ‘rejections of imagined enclosures of gender’, suggesting a superseding of the grasp of binarism.

The two pieces display an ample structuredness without yearning for at a final (or even durable) solution, in this hazardous playing-out of the planet’s eco-futures and -pasts. The accompanying images, while themselves also clearly engineered, adhere to usual photographic conventions such as utilising a central focal point as well as foreground and background contours. The texts, despite the interpolation of a number of variable blank spaces that ‘naturally’ open up within them like trapdoors on the Elizabethan stage, occupy roughly the same space-size as the images and are themselves firmly wrapped within justified paragraph formats.

Another compelling feature concerns the interplay between structure and the contrivance of textuality. Orchid calibrates coherent passages out of materials derived from disparate sources, one of these being her own mind. Others are represented in a plenitude of historical scientific titles, including the delightful Botany for Ladies, carefully gathered into precise footnotes.

Moreover, both pieces end on a note of optimism, promise. The first turns any seeking of preordained ends into a ‘happy endling’, and the second closes with ‘kind kin giddy with amusement’. It seems that boundedness urges towards its own unbinding.

Vibrant, smart, ecologically di-stressed, these pieces exercise the muscular power of the mind in its endeavour to pry open the presumptions and closures of human thought and our beset ecological inhabitation. What is continuity? What is rupture? What holds them together?

notes

[1] How different a purpose these coordinates serve from ‘Velleity’s ‘0800 929 929’?