Dr Yewande Pearse — Sound Science: Kinship with Plants

About this episode

This episode is all about plants, and the art practices that help us to connect with them. Millennials are obsessed with house plants, driven in large part by an interest in self-care and wellness. Plants are good for our mental health, and thanks to social media, they’ve become increasingly desirable for their aesthetic. However, what we tend to forget is that making us feel better, and livening up our urban dwellings is the least they do for us. Plants provide the core basis for life on Earth. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe, and we’d have nothing to eat. Despite how essential they are to our survival, we take them for granted. In this episode, we explore how turning plants into art, can help us to develop a deeper understanding and empathy toward them. Bio: Alice Yuan Zhang is a mixed reality artist, designer, and program organizer. Her work bridges the sacredness of natural environments with the speculative power of human-made ones, inviting exploration into interspecies empathy, generative networks, and the illusion of agency. She is the co-organizer of virtual care lab, a current resident artist at CultureHub, and an involved member of NAVEL. Alice studied