Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 13

unless he has filled his mind with such things through
much copying [from nature]. This is then no longer
to be called his own but has become an acquired and
learned art [kunst], which sows, waxes, and bears fruit.” 11
While some writers and image makers have thought
to draw upon the generative properties of plants,
others have found in their rootedness an apt analogy
for constriction and impossibility. The French prose
poet Francis Ponge described the vegetal organism as
passive and captive, waiting for the world to come to it.
“HENCE THE ESSENTIAL QUALITY OF THIS
BEING,” he wrote in all caps, “IMMOBILITY.” 12 This
sense of the restrictiveness to which plants are subject
has led women, victims of racial discrimination, or oth-
ers injured by social restraints, to describe the inability
to achieve the full potential of growth in horticultural
terms. 13 In a poem entitled “The Work of Artifice,”
Marge Piercy describes the dimensions of a bonsai tree,
which could have grown eighty feet tall were it not for
the pruning of the gardener. Instead, it is nine-inches
high. “With living creatures / one must begin very early
/ to dwarf their growth,” she writes. 14 Not all beings can
realize the natural expanse of their upward rise, whose
vertical ascendancy Plato, in his Timaeus, likened to
moral rectitude. 15
Yet because being trimmed back, having samples sev-
ered, or feeling bound to the limited circumference of
a rhizosphere prevent certain opportunities for natural
efflorescence, inventors who have looked to the botani-
cal for metaphors of feelings or circumstance have also
brought the unique properties of plants to light. In her
analysis of Ponge’s poetry, Christy Wampole writes of
the “false immobility” of the plant, whose growth takes
place unseen and underground: “For the plant is not
actually still; it creeps and spreads itself in far more
creative ways than the human . . . Roots may provide
stability for the plant, but they are by no means anchors,
despite the tendency to metaphorize them as such.” 16
Figure 7. Martha Glowacki (American, b. 1950), Collinson’s
Rapture (detail), 2011–2012, wood, cast and fabricated
bronze, inkjet prints, glass, pigments, 23 x 17 x 3 in.
Photo Eric Ferguson.
To neglect to recognize the fullness of the vegetal poten-
tial for radial outreach is a failure of human perception
to see anything but an aboveground view.
The play between propagation and stricture, perma-
nence and possibility, abound in Glowacki’s work. In a
series called Collinson’s Rapture, where cast and fabri-
cated plants are frame d and mounted on the wall, it is
words that are pinned down (Figure 7). 17 Pieces of the
mid-eighteenth-century transatlantic correspondence
between Royal Society fellow Peter Collinson and the
Philadelphia horticulturist John Bartram are snipped
into phrases, tacked like immobilized specimens, await-
ing the viewer’s study. 18 The process of attempting to
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