My niece actually said the words, said that she "hated nature."

How could she believe such a thing? Say such a thing? Born and raised in NYC, was it her 23 years of standing on man-made materials, filling her lungs with subway tunnel air, her reality that circled the purchase of this, focused on the price of that... what had made her believe herself separate from the natural world? Separate from what she is??

Considering the tendency of the contemporary human to dismiss nature as other, I focused on the aspects of nature most diminished — the plants that we rarely even name in anything other than the slanderous term, weeds. And as I explored the critical role that "weeds" play in a biologically diverse system, my mind first settled on goldenrod.

In New York State, goldenrod is one of the final plants to blossom in autumn and its seeds fuel the journey of migrating birds, such as the rose-breasted grosbeak.

I wondered, I wonder, if schoolrooms and streets with populated with citizens clothed in garments printed with weeds, how would psyches be affected? So I sewed a jumpsuit of cotton printed with an image of goldenrod I had taken in the Catskill Mountains to further explore the idea.

And created a video collage of a kid who lives on my block — Clara — dressed in the weed suit.

Clara In The Weed Suit

Created as a concept / pitch for an industry label (ie. Boden or the Gap), weed suit proposes that human bodies can be used to create (representational) fields of biodiversity, while harnessing the mechanisms of capitalism as a catalyst for social change