Materia Medica

Materia Medica is a body of still-life paintings that takes as its subject the abortifacient plants: botanical agents that women across cultures and throughout history have used to govern their own reproductive lives. I have painted the cotton bloom and bole, thistle, chicory, and the peacock flower — that last a debt I owe to the naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, who in 1705 documented in Suriname what enslaved women already knew: that this flower could end a pregnancy, and with it, the prospect of bringing a child into bondage.

The suppression of reproductive freedom has always begun with the suppression of knowledge. To name these plants in paint — to give them the formal attention of the canvas within the luminous, meticulous tradition of botanical still life — is to restore something of their gravity, and to bear witness to the fact that this knowledge existed, that women held it, and that it was always theirs.

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