Curtin College recently adopted its new team charter. Instead of adding conventional physical signatures to the document, the charter was endorsed by symbolic botanical thumbprints.
Each staff member nominated a flower, plant or tree that was personally or culturally meaningful to them. The resulting visually stunning digital collage, an arrangement of petals, leaves and tree silhouettes, was the idea of the College’s Humanities Program Manager, Frances Sullivan-Rhodes, a well-known WA-based visual artist.
The title of her work, Only Connect, refers to E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, where the early twentieth century American author grapples with the complexity of human connection and the significance of interpersonal relationships. The weaving together of plants from all corners of the globe as a spectacularly colourful bouquet symbolises Curtin College’s highly diverse collegium and student body. Fran’s work celebrates the potential that inheres the coming together and connecting of people from many different backgrounds in the context of academic enquiry. Green Apple recently sat down with Fran to discuss her artwork.
Could you please us about how you developed the idea of this botanical signature, and what inspired you?
I came across an essay by Michel Foucault when I was undertaking my Masters and it also informed my candidacy application when I began my PhD. The essay is titled Des Espaces Autres (1967) and it was the idea within Foucault’s discussion of “heterotopias”; that there could be places that are portable or that negotiate displacement, which particularly appealed to me, as a serial migrant. Foucault’s idea offers the possibility of a visual metaphor for homing or belonging, and for valuing something derived of many parts from many places. After the recent Navitas webinar reaffirming our commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, I started to think about this metaphor again, as a way of creating a portrait of a community that is celebrating diversity.
Was there a recurrent theme in the plants that were nominated by your colleagues? Did any choices surprise you?
There were a couple of duplicate requests, but I had asked people to think of plants that had either personal or national/cultural significance for them. For instance, my mother is from South Africa, my father is from the UK and my kids were born here in Australia. If I were to arrange flowers that represent them I would combine the Kangaroo Paw for Western Australia, the rose for the UK and the King Protea for South Africa.
What has been the response to “Only Connect” so far?
It’s been really positive! I was thrilled that people like it so much. I wanted it to be a gift for the team, to make something that we can feel part of and see ourselves reflected in. It hasn’t been shared more widely yet, but I would very much like to grow this idea and to provide a mentorship opportunity for students to be involved in the photographing plants, digitally editing images and composing designs for a yearly plant portrait of the members of our whole College community. I am currently working on a catalogue to accompany this print, which can be used as a mural in our new College building, detailing what each plant represented and acknowledging the people who contributed those plants to the design.