Charmaine Lurch, Pollen Grains & Seeds, 2019–ongoing. Detail. Courtesy of the artist.
What if sculpture was not solely observed by community but instead embodied community?
What if this community was not tied to a particular place or time, but rather, a series of interconnected beings, places, and objects?
Charmaine Lurch has brought us to this point through her work, Pollen Grains & Seeds, which offers viewers layer upon layer of relationality and interdependence.
More than 60 grains of pollen, each hand-sculpted out of wire, are mounted to a 20-foot canvas. As the sun moves, light enters the armatures and shadows crawl through the space, minute by minute, hour by hour.
Each of Lurch’s pollen grains is wrapped in electrical cable, unsheathed and then separated into its component parts: thin wires of varying oranges, browns, greens, blues, reds, and whites. These wires are then wrapped around the thicker, sturdier wire that structures Lurch’s pollen grains. As in nature, each grain is unique.
Over the course of their lifetime, the coloured wires, many of them recycled, have shuttled electrical currents, messages, and ideas across space, translating the flick of a switch or push of a button into a larger purpose. Likewise, the process of making Pollen Grains & Seeds has translated the act of wrapping wire into an expansive collective act.
During community workshops, school visits, and small gatherings at her home, Lurch has shared her process for making the grains with others, inviting community members to participate in their creation. The result is grains that have been handled and adorned by a network of people, a process wherein the visible/invisible has been collapsed. As with many of Lurch’s other works, Things with Wings (2009, 2012) and The Phenomenal Henrietta Lacks (2015), the miniscule (and often microscopic) has been brought squarely into focus, encouraging us not to think but, instead, to notice.
Pollen is not static. Smaller than the width of a human hair and measured in micrometres, it clings to the faces, eyes, necks, and backs of bees, beetles, bats, and other pollinators. It rides wings and winds to preserve both past and future.
Charmaine Lurch, Pollen Grains & Seeds, 2019–ongoing. Work in progress. Courtesy of the artist.
The pollen grain wall is highly resistant to environmental damage and may even survive in sedimentary rocks for many millions of years.
Pollen grains are 10-70 µm in diameter. There are 1000 µm in 1 mm.
As the show is being mounted, a worker, on site to install the electrical systems, walks past a completed pollen grain and instantly recognizes the wires.
“I knew it looked familiar,” he says.
Hundreds of metres of cable, unsheathed and separated. Autumnal yellows, oranges, browns, and greens migrating across lines we have deemed “borders” on a page we call a “map.”
But pollen yields neither to empire, nor borders, nor freight rates.
While these wire-on-wire armatures may appear fixed to the canvas, light reminds us that wire is not static either.
Wire is music, wire is fences. Wire is porous, it is lines pulled from canvas, moving us from two dimensions to three. It is heart stents and filament.
When Charmaine Lurch invites community members to join her in making pollen grains, we are invited to take the wire into our own hands and to remember our own connections to—and dependence upon—movement and migration.
Through our movements, we embed our labour and stories into the wire—wire that is both message and messenger. Our stories, like pollen, cleave to the people and things that will pull them across time and space.
This borderless dust is critical to the survival of the planet and our survival as a species. Where one person stops,
another will continue.
Several generations methodically shaping and wrapping grains of pollen, each twist, each style, an invitation to notice.
Ovoid, spheroidal, triangular, psilate, reticulate, striate, and verrucate: a nomenclature for our dependence. Our handling of pollen is liberatory; pollen moves us from stigma to stamen.
“People sit for hours working on pollen grains. They just lose themselves in the work,” Lurch observes, “they just lose themselves in the work.”
The italicized sections in this piece have been taken from “What is Pollen?,” a resource by the University of Western Australia.
Charmaine Lurch is a conceptual artist whose work draws attention to human-environmental relationalities. Her paintings and sculptures are conversations on infrastructures and the spaces and places we inhabit. Working with a range of materials and reimagining our surroundings—from bees and taxi cabs to The Tempest and quiet moments of joy, Lurch subtly connects Black life and movement globally. She has exhibited in venues throughout and beyond Canada, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Massillon Museum (Ohio), National Gallery of Jamaica and at WEAD/Platform 3 (Tehran) and her works have been acquired by several institutions and private collectors including Global Affairs Canada.
Phillip Dwight Morgan is a first-generation Canadian writer of Jamaican heritage. His writings explore issues of race and representation in Canada and have appeared in Maclean's, The Toronto Star, CBC News, and The Walrus, among others.