Making a Name

Yukon Gold or yellow-as-the-tired-belly-of-the-lizard?

Making a Name is an interactive and collaborative audio-installation. The artwork invites participants to consider new and enriched vocabularies for the naming and categorisation of plants through touch, imagination and play.

Participants are invited to pick up a potato, feel their eyes, and consider the textures of their skin. With these answers, they create a unique name for their potato: examples include beige-wise-whale, a violet shaft of stardust, and as surprised as a lost soul.

Making a Name seeks to open the fields of nomenclature and taxonomy to non-scientists of all ages. In centering invention, participants may consider what can be gained from attuning their senses to the vegetal world. Each name is a condensed form of knowledge; a record of an interaction rooted in observation and an antidote to reductionism.