Reclaim, 2020

Reclaim explores the rebellion of refusing to submit to feminine social roles and instead forge your own path. Inspired by 1960s - 70s speculative feminist fiction in which female protagonists take ownership of their mundane lives through a physical transformation, becoming other entities entirely - plants.

As stated by Elvia Wilk ‘These stories offer a curious inversion of the classic female imperative to “put down roots and start a family.” After all, women are supposed to be good at this sort of thing. Communing with nature, nurturing, caring. Like the family garden, like the landscape, she is supposed to be a passive, fertile resource to be exploited. Like the earth, she is supposed to be penetrable, boundariless, ready for implantation and extraction. Those are profoundly non-weird ideas about there being a biological basis for women’s ability to empathize, self-sacrifice, and reproduce.

But the literal becoming-plant that happens in these stories suggests the potential for agency in the willing dissolution of self. Knowing how to dissolve and become other is a non-codified and embodied kind of knowledge that women, and other supposedly unstable bodies, have been cultivating for centuries, because they’ve had to.’