Britain has been a passionate leader in global plant collection for about as long as Britain has existed. It’s a spill-off of empire, and is entirely worthy of criticism, but it’s also helped to diversify, often by accident, our national plant life.
There was the accidentally-on-purpose introduction of Japanese Knotweed in 1850, the infinitely spreading giant Gunnera leaves that line lakes and wetlands around the country or the quaint wall decorations of ivy-leaved toad flax, introduced from Italy in the early 1600s.
All of the above are common sights across Britain, sometimes treated as weeds, sometimes celebrated. But all are a record of Britain’s and, pointedly, Liverpool’s impact on global trade.
Chris Shaw’s photography series, Weeds of Wallasey, is the starting point for this exhibition, named after one of the images in the series; ‘I See No Ships but The Plant That Stowed Away’. The images are a document of plant life fighting through industrial Wallasey, through concrete, or growing from rusted ironwork.
These plants have been introduced out of botanical curiosity, or seeds have been accidentally imported on trade routes and slave ships. Tate have pulled from their own collection to explore artistic celebrations of weeds and forgotten flora, but it’s Lubaina Himid, with previously un-exhibited work invited for this exhibition, who has shared work that reflects on these incidental introductions, and the British hobby of cataloguing in a way that adds real context.
In this space, Lubaina Himid’s ‘Underwater Plant Life’ is a simple reminder of what that cataloguing and collection owes itself to, but the displaced and disturbed fish, people, plants on that canvas, interact with each other.
Structurally, it works alongside Chris Shaw’s catalogued photography, but thematically, it’s a deeper critique of colonialism that helps give this exhibition its identity.
Chris Shaw’s documentary of local plant life is stunning though. Playing with live cataloguing, scrap booking and scrawled notation to absolutely celebrate the identity of everything he pictures.
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The Plant That Stowed Away is open at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North (Mann Island) until 11th May 2025
Words, Kathryn Wainwright