(Image description: A 10 minute and 4-second stop-motion animation that begins with two floating amoeba-like forms wiggling and drifting across a mauve and coral visual field that feels like the watery reflections glistening on the surface of a swimming pool on a bright, sunny day. The biomorphic floral shapes, which slowly meander and rotate, are composed of layered images of the artist’s cupped pale pinkish-white hands gently opening up and closing in a loop, like water lilies’ cycles of blooming and closure. The flower form on the left is made up of a collage of hands as the petal structure, with red, purple, and pink lilypad shapes projected onto the skin’s surface. The form on the right is shaped by a blob-like circle of bubblegum-pink hands, the fingers wriggling and extending, reaching out to sense their surroundings. The centers of both “flowers” are created by more hands in motion, overlaid with projections of underlined text from Prudence Gibson and Monica Gagliano’s The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily (2017). After15 seconds have elapsed, the image cross-fades to reveal a wider view of the rose-hued liquid surface, scattered with a network of human-hand/water-lily-hybrids of varying sizes, undulating, breathing together. Accompanying the moving image is a recording of splashing, bubbling sounds of flowing water. Sounds of human breath, distant voices, and birds are discernable in the background of the audio. At around one minute, the loop repeats.)

Simultaneously rooted in the sodden earth, yet capable of intelligently drifting freely across the water’s shimmering surface, the nymphaea, a clustered network, commune without words, transmitting signals, somatic languages of intoxicating scents and volatile compounds, reaching outward to bees and beetles, and to one another.

Nymphaea is a stop-motion animation created as a collaboration between interdisciplinary artists Maggie-Rose Condit-Summerson and John Summerson using practical projection and digital collage. Inspired by Prudence Gibson and Monica Gagliano’s The Feminist Plant: Changing Relations with the Water Lily (2017) and Donna Haraway’s imagining of the non-anthropocentric, tentacular ecological entanglements of the Cthulucene (2016), Nymphaea explores the possibilities of thinking with water lilies as a “companion species” (Gibson & Gagliano, p. 142).

Particularly in histories of Eurocentric visual representation, the water lily has come to stand in for fetishized feminine beauty, for untarnished “purity” and gendered “otherworldliness,” idealized and heterosexualized (Gibson & Gagliano, p. 128). The etymology of the name of the genus of the water lily, nymphaea, can be traced to the Greek nymphē, which translates to “bride,” or “veiled one,” calling out to the Greek nymphs, mythical feminine deities and ethereal personifications of the ancient natural world (Marder, 2014). And yet, water lilies’ actual life cycles are far more complex, more queer than these essentialized feminine images. Nymphaea can reproduce both asexually and sexually, through adaptive self-pollination using overlapping reproductive organs, as well as inter-floral commingling with the help of nearby insects (Gibson & Gagliano, p. 134). Through these processes of vitality, the nymphaea retain autonomy while simultaneously and symbiotically cooperating within intra-and-inter-species collectives, defying colonial humanist ontological understandings of biological binaries, such as sexual dimorphism (Lugones, 2010), and the privileging of the individual. Represented within the genus are wide arrays of shapes, sizes, temporal cycles, hues, and scents, actively attracting and accommodating specific pollinators to take refuge within the lilies’ structures, and sending out hormonal messages signaling threats to the wider rhizomatic lily network. Able to float adrift while remaining rooted, nymphaea raise useful questions about judgments of the value of life derived from narrow, dominant notions of mobility. Thus, Gibson and Gagliano ask how feminists might reclaim the water lily (and plants in general) from reductive anthropomorphized associations, eschewing the equation of femininity with fragility and purity, in order to “becom[e] other” (p. 137), to learn with water lilies as models for post-human survival. Aligning with this feminist and queer re-writing, Nymphaea seeks to communicate the deep inter-and-intra-species relationality and extralinguistic communication embodied by the water lily, while avoiding heteropatriarchal imagery connecting water lilies to an idealized and passive female body.

Sources:

Gibson, P., & Gagliano, M. (2017). The feminist plant: Changing relations with the water lily. Ethics & The Environment, 22(2), 125-147.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Cthulucene. Duke University Press.

Marder, M. (2014). The philosopher’s plant. Columbia University Press.

Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a decolonial feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742-759.