Plants and Concrete: Aggressive Coexistence
Plants display tenacity in the world around us. They seem to survive in places where they are either not welcome or not nurtured to succeed. This is especially evident when we look at the common use of concrete in urban and suburban communities. As a man-made material, concrete does not have a symbiotic relationship with plants. Yet the two have coexisted for centuries.
The idea behind Aggressive Coexistence is to get people to notice this relationship by showing dimensional moments of the two together. The plants gathered are preserved with an acrylic primer. By taking the color out of the situation, we see them as symbols rather than specific plants. They are then pressed into wet concrete that hardens, thereby freezing the moment in time. These pieces remind us of the relationship – the perpetual rivalry between the organic and the man-made, and the eternal struggle to coexist.