The Unloved (2025, ongoing)

Exhibition history 2025 Atletika, Vilnius, LT (solo)

In The Unloved, the figure of the ‘weed’ is animated through a combination of film, photography, collage, text and ephemera that sits somewhere in the cracks between museum herbarium, Gothic fantasy, childhood fable and amateur theatre.

Entering the exhibition, two large silk collages intertwine ghostly narratives with botanical history. These photographic fabric prints layer pressed plant specimens from the herbarium at London’s Natural History Museum with archival photographs and documents of spectral stories tied toVictorian glasshouses. The selections are not random, they all depict plants such as the Mandrake, Mugwort, Pheasant’s Eye and Daffodil, each with a history of shifting cultural significance, once revered for their medicinal or mystical properties, only to be later dismissed as weeds. These botanical specimens merge with faded portraits and eerie traces of the past, referencing folklore, literature, and film, where the boundaries between the living and the spectral blur. We see glimpses of these plants appearing in iconic artworks, films and literature such as John Millais’s Ophelia, The Day of the Triffids and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In the next room, an unsettling short video introduces us to a delicate plant stalk adorned with eyes, modeled after the haunting figure of Saint Lucy from Francesco del Cossa’s 15th Century painting. In a visual style reminiscent of Czech animations for children, the eyes of Lucy (voiced by Lithuanian actress Bernadeta Lukošiūtė) narrate a brief history of the presence of so-called ‘weeds’ in human life, from the mention of ‘thorns and thistles’ in Genesis through to the Victorian obsession with plant-hunting. Their focus is on who and what determines one to be a weed, and how Empire expansion led to a Gothic fantasy of plants as exoticised and fetishised Others.

Following these draped collages into the next gallery, they now become reference to theatre curtains or backstage partitions, as we hear the voice of an actor drawing us closer. Seated in what appears to be an abandoned theatre or cinema and dressed in an extravagant plant-like costume they recount stories of their acting career across stage and screen. Their specialty is playing the weed and their desirability as an actor is based on the fickle tastes of directors and audiences. They are an Outsider, an Other, and find their home amongst the resilient peers thriving on the margins. Remaining slippery, the film slides from this monologue into a series of increasingly hallucinatory vignettes, Gothic tales of sentient plants, vengeful ghosts and a theatre set ablaze. Our actor inhabits the role of narrator, recounting these stories to an empty theatre before giving way to the ghosts of the architecture in what becomes something close to a haunting, Lynchian dream.

Living in times characterised as the end of the world, The Unloved is an exploration of identity, transformation, and the resilience of the overlooked, inviting audiences to see beauty in the tenacity of what is often dismissed or despised.

Exhibition text from Atletika, Vilnius, 2025

Essay by Juliet Jacques

For centuries, the relationship between humans and nature was primarily adversarial. Within the natural world, we had the considerable advantage of being bipeds with opposable thumbs, and incredibly sophisticated communicatory abilities. But we were at the mercy not just of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, nor just those animals that could match us in a hunt, but also the infinite variety and complexity of vegetation, most obviously with its power to poison us. That vegetation could symbolically outrun and overrun us too, and the way for people to master it – as we did the natural world throughout the modern, industrial age – was to categorise and classify it, with those plants not desired in the gardens we cultivated written off as weeds.

Many of our contemporary liberation movements spring out of the modern mania to categorise things, as to way to formalise, justify and entrench the hierarchies that had emerged. What, ask Sam Williams and Felicia Honkasalo in The Unloved, if weeds could talk: would they demand an end to stigmatisation, to suppression? Would they indict human beings for extending their processes of domination all the way into the plant world? Would they, as the central character (voiced by Bernadeta Lukošiūtė, host of children’s radio and TV programmes in Lithuania) in The Ramifications of Botanical Desire does, see the local differences and attendant hypocrisy, in how the Victorians saw the British countryside as domesticated nature – something to celebrate in landscape paintings and Romantic poetry – and the countryside from Ireland to India as something to conquer and control?

Flower arrangement became competitive amongst the emerging Victorian suburban middle class: people wanted to be seen with exotic plants in their carefully curated gardens. Falling behind the fashion was bad enough; having a garden taken over by weeds – a category that had existed for centuries, so there was no excuse for not knowing about it – quite another. The state of people’s gardens came to indicate not just their social standing, but their qualities as a citizen. In the post-independence United States, a meticulously maintained lawn became a mark of responsibility and discipline; in the former colonial metropole, some level of asymmetry was a sign of a creative mind, but too much disorder showed laziness, unsociability or instability. Everywhere, though, the persistence of weeds, and their indifference to apparently superior human desires and demands, provoked frustration and fury amongst garden enthusiasts.

In The Unloved, the narrator addresses the treatment of weeds as unwelcome, unwanted living things. Lavinia Co-op – the legendary performer in the BLOOLIPS radical gay theatre group and Hot Peaches drag collective, and Gay Liberation Front activist and member, plays the plant-actor – reminiscent of Lindsay Kemp, star of the musical Flowers (though it was based on Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers rather than anything botanical), and talks about “the bodily need to inhabit new roles, to grow, to spread, to be seen”. We learn that Shakespeare “loved a weed”, writing, ‘With baleful weeds and precious juice flowers, the Earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb.’ The actor talks about how plant roles in plays “always get somewhat overlooked”, and receiving less attention on getting older and less (conventionally) beautiful. The only way to stay relevant – especially when having to compete for attention with actual deaths of actresses in horrific theatre fires, to which audiences were morbidly drawn – was to start playing villains: “bloodthirsty vegetables, plants with murderous intent, which move and kill at will … flesh-eating carnivorous houseplants, alien invaders”.

This gives voice to some repressed fears, which built on Gothic literary novels about ‘freakish bodies’, from Horace Walpole’s ghost story The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). These came to the fore as cultural works shifted from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which portrayed the garden as a place of beauty and imagination, to John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic Day of the Triffids (1951) or Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors (1960), the basis for the popular musical, in which aggressive species of plant fed on human flesh. It’s tempting to see the more serious post-war works in this vein as a metaphor for Cold War fears about the spread of communism, and more recent ones as a commentary on climate change.

But what if we read them on a literal as well as metaphorical level? We know that for centuries, we have treated plants as completely subservient to our needs and condemned whole species of them to be an underclass, as we have animals, and indeed, huge groups of people? What if plants were to rise up against us, like the bourgeoisie in France in 1789, the proletariat in Russia in 1917, or the slaves in Haiti in 1791-1804? Could plants – and especially weeds – possibly do to us what we have done to them? Perhaps an uprising might start from a – quite reasonable – sense that human beings, and especially Victorian Britons, have a real nerve in calling other species ‘invasive’? Likely, it would end in them taking our cities; the difficulty in removing Japanese knotweed from anywhere it settles demonstrates their resilience and determination. In 2018, I visited Pripyat, the town built to serve the Vladimir Ilich Lenin nuclear plant in Chornobyl, just over 30 years since the infamous disaster. In the abandoned exclusion zone, weeds were everywhere, climbing up the massive Duga-1 radar structure and growing around the collapsing hospital, schools and supermarkets of Pripyat. However human and animal life ends – amidst an apocalyptic war, man-made climate change, an atmosphere-changing asteroid strike or volcanic eruption, or the Sun expanding to the point that it becomes unsustainable – history will end with the weeds inheriting the Earth.

Ultimately, The Unloved is not about revenge fantasies, but reconciliation. The works engage us in dialogue about the meaning, categorisation and treatment of the weed, and its wider ramifications – leaving its metaphorical connotations up to us. Above all, they ask us to look again at the unwanted and undesirable, and challenge us to love them, however radical an act that might seem.

– Juliet Jacques