Materia Medica

Materia Medica is an ongoing project investigating the role of plants in women's health. This series of paintings explores abortifacient plants: botanical agents that women across cultures and throughout history have used to govern their own reproductive lives. My subjects thus far have been cotton, thistle, chicory, and the peacock flower — the last inspired by 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 still-life tradition has always concerned itself with the objects of domestic life, with the quiet persistence of things. These plants are not dramatic. They grow on roadsides, in fields, in the cracks between spaces. Their power has been precisely in their ordinariness — available, legible to those who knew how to read them, and therefore, for centuries, a form of bodily sovereignty that required no permission.