ENGLISH FLOWER BEDS (3min, 2025)
~ This short film weaves together self-shot footage, layered imagery, and montage to explore the colonial legacies embedded in Britain’s botanical gardens.- using the formal garden and the botanical garden as a symbolic starting point to piece together the story of the HMS Bounty and the colonial maritime expedition commissioned by King George III upon advisory by Sir Joseph Banks, the then advisor of Kew Botanical Gardens - the ship set sail from Deptford Docklands with the purpose of cultivating breadfruit trees as a source of food for enslaved subjects of the British empire in the Caribbean. The film integrates excerpts from The Day of the Triffids (1963), a sci-fi classic where plants threaten human dominance, and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which romanticizes the rebellion of officers who ultimately set fire to their ship. Through these cinematic references, the work reflects on the entangled histories of botany, empire, resistance and limitations of controlled natural environments.
~ This short film weaves together self-shot footage, layered imagery, and montage to explore the colonial legacies embedded in Britain’s botanical gardens.- using the formal garden and the botanical garden as a symbolic starting point to piece together the story of the HMS Bounty and the colonial maritime expedition commissioned by King George III upon advisory by Sir Joseph Banks, the then advisor of Kew Botanical Gardens - the ship set sail from Deptford Docklands with the purpose of cultivating breadfruit trees as a source of food for enslaved subjects of the British empire in the Caribbean. The film integrates excerpts from The Day of the Triffids (1963), a sci-fi classic where plants threaten human dominance, and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which romanticizes the rebellion of officers who ultimately set fire to their ship. Through these cinematic references, the work reflects on the entangled histories of botany, empire, resistance and limitations of controlled natural environments.