Cotyledon, June 2022

Cotyledon, that's the technical term for the lovingly packed lunch inside of a seed. Crack open a lucky one and you may find a tinsy pair of leaves waiting to deploy. The first limbs to creep out of the soil, yawn, stretch and shake off its outer shell, cotyledon is an embryonic leaf that bears little resemblance to its true leaves. Housing enough matter and energy to sustain the intense growth of a seedling, they are a tiny, but mighty affirmation that everything one needs is within.

The artworks presented for this exhibition were selected with this framework in mind. As the first green to crop up, seed leaves mark a site in the soil - a place of new growth. They are at once an action, a place, and a limb. In varying strides, each work responds to the spirit and sensibility of cotyledon. It begins as an utterance, buried somewhere in the throat as suggested by Julio Panisello-Huguet’s Neck (Front). It is also a site of richness and possibility, even in the smallest and most unassuming of manners, like Evan Mendel’s works on cardboard. Cotyledon is a foundation: beginning in the seed and breaking through the loam, it is body in formation, akin to Órla Bates’ figure emerging from the terra firma. Those first days when a seedling emerges from the ground, rearing its neck and becoming, they bare the familiarities of our own flesh and remind us that the stuff of flora is not too far off from that of fauna. Together the works in this exhibition encourage the notion that the natural world is our collaborator and furthermore, that no matter the taxonomy, we are all bodies on this Body.