Annie France
Leclerc

Annie France Leclerc’s relationship with plants is profoundly intimate, therapeutic, and infused with curiosity. She visits places where plants abound both to learn about them and to learn more about herself. Here, she creates a contemplative space that both offers knowledge about certain plants and encourages us to feel a relationship of equity with them. Using a bouquet made of “weeds” gathered during the end-of-season pruning done by the gardeners at the Jardin Daniel A. Séguin and tinctorial plants that she seeded in the garden, she dyed the silk and cotton that shelter us in the work. As she processes these plants, Leclerc always tries to be attentive to their agency, so that the results embody the potential of plants and testify to some of their perhaps subtler qualities. By printing pinhole photographs onto the fabrics, she also invests her own body in the work—a body in a posture of care that reminds us that knowledge of the properties and uses of plants is also manifested by a perceptual experience of them.