“Plants are our kin and ancestors,” says Jemma Foster, an artist, writer, and researcher-advocate of plants, “and these masters of adaptation and survival can be our greatest teachers, if only we learn to listen.” Through her numerous creative expressions, Jemma invites us to surrender our thinking minds, expand our listening to include whole body sensing, then “become plant.” From that experiential ground, she asks, “What future will we dream when we dream with the more-than-human?”
In one version of guiding others into an answer, Jemma stands upon a dimmed stage in Sweden, a thousand curious minds gathered from around the world to explore the relationship between humans, machines, and nature. Jemma ambles back and forth, guiding the audience in a hypnotic meditation into the “pregnant nothingness” before there was form, then invites them to reawaken to the dimension of form, but as a plant. In another version, she creates an art installation of sound, “A Tale of Two Seeds,” that plays recordings of what a healthy, biodiverse soil feels like — a sonic landscape — compared to one that has been subjected to industrial agriculture and lost its rich biodiversity.
Jemma arrived here in her work on a circuitous yet cohesive path, which she describes as “intuitive and organic.” After a masters in English Literature at Edinburgh University, her professional work began in journalism and scriptwriting. Alongside this, she began hosting supper clubs on her narrowboat in London. Then, as various teachers began to show up through spontaneous conversations, sparked by Jemma’s desire to know her food sources, she spent a decade-long journey immersed in nature, foraging and learning ethnobotany and studying food as medicine. Her teachers have spanned the diverse roles she has explored: researcher, publisher, artist, a practitioner of plant and vibrational medicine and more. She feels that connecting to more-than-human intelligence and energy systems like plants and planets is critical to dispelling the myth of separation from nature and the cosmos.
Jemma actively advocates for the agency and rights of plants. Her work explores fragile ecologies and agricultural processes through more-than-human soundscapes, emerging technologies, as well as the role of ritual. She is founder and co-founder of several such projects. Like a multi-media art collective, Wild Alchemy Lab, that publishes an augmented-reality print journal exploring ecology, science, and esoterica at the intersection of art and technology, featuring some of the world’s leading creatives and thinkers. Like the award-winning creative studio Semantica, whose artwork has been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide. Most recently, she has been exploring ways of listening and more-than-human dreaming, including an AR installation, Dreaming With Stones at the ICA, London, and curating Oneiric Soils, a dreaming-with-plants residency for artists and researchers in Greece.
She is the author of a book, Sacred Geometry: How to Use Cosmic Patterns to Power Up Your Life, and an illustrated card deck where alchemy meets astrology, offering remedies to heal the emotional and physical body, Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-Botanical Remedy Deck. She also has a forthcoming book, fall 2024, Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-Botanical Guide to the Magic, Myth and Medicine of Plants. Her earlier work includes publications in The Guardian and a series of short stories, The Cardboard Book Project.
“Plants are an orchestra,” Jemma says. “There’s a symphony happening beneath our feet.”
Please join Mark Peters and Cynthia Li in conversation with this advocate and deep listener of plants and other nonhuman life, and tap into the collective wisdom they hold.
