Worm, Root, Wort…&Bane: Photography Exhibit, Book Discusses Women’s Ancient Knowledge, Wise Ways Of Working With Plants
The Alice Austen House Museum announces its new exhibition Ann Shelton: worm, root, wort… & bane
Editor’s Note: As was mentioned in a previous article, many of the herbs that have been used in American herbalism were derived from native tribal uses, and often from indigenous cultures worldwide. This includes some of the pagan and Wiccan traditions. Many herbs were used in the early Americas in some of the older medical practices, and these were derived from many different sources.
Medical systems that came into widespread use in the late 1800s, eventually replacing and even outlawing traditional medicine practitioners such as midwives and herbalists, were based on lengthy university education programs. This was also at a much higher cost than what came before, restricting the practice of medicine in most cases to wealthy individuals. The book by Matthew Wood, The Book of Herbal Wisdom: Using Plants as Medicines, discusses the difficulty related to the practice of herbal medicine in the United States, and the legal harassment he and other herbalists of his time were subject to.
Prior to this time, people in the field of healing and therapy were traditionally educated via apprenticeship. It was even the case that midwifery as a practice overall was against the law in many states in the United States until the advent of many movements, including modern feminism and the maternal health care movement, which put public pressure to bear, and caused some those laws to be changed. However, as you’ll see below in the quote from Birth Services, many states still have traditional midwifery, without the need for a physician as a mediator, outlawed. This restricts women’s choices.
According to Monica Wilde’s timeline of herbal medicine there have been both men and women in the history of herbalism. This includes Hippocrates and Dioscorides, who both published books on herbs and their use in the treatment of disease. “During the 17th and 18th centuries the different medical disciplines co-existed. However, the rise of city living, with their concentrations of wealth, also denied many people access to plants that they would have gathered themselves in rural villages. The dependence on physicians and pharmacists grew steadily. However, partly inspired by American herbalists who visited Britain and gave public lectures, herbal medicine continued to be of interest. For many people herbal medicine was far more affordable that the physicians medicines, and many people feared their terrible side-effects.”
According to a Stat News article, “By the 1940’s midwifery was virtually eradicated in the United States.
It was preserved, however, in Black communities, whose members were not allowed in many hospitals during segregation.”
This description from Birth Services.net talks about the laws CURRENTLY restricting the practice of midwifery in states in the US:
“I looked at every state’s licensing laws. 23 of the states that license have severe restrictions (everything from required physician permission to home birth to no HBACs to only certain types of midwives can attend home birth to required vaginal exams, required testing, required transfer if woman doesn’t “progress” according to the state, to outright making home birth midwifery illegal, etc.) on a woman’s right to choose. These states are: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming.
“No state has rescinded nor lessened their restrictions. Only Minnesota, Montana, Virginia, and Wisconsin license midwives without restricting women. 13 states do not license midwives and therefore do not restrict women’s choices – Connecticut, Hawaii, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon (voluntary licensure), Pennsylvania, Tennessee. 7 states do not license but make home birth midwifery illegal – Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky (no permits given since 1975), Nebraska, North Carolina and South Dakota. Michigan just licensed and rules and regulations have not yet been written. West Virginia is licensed but I couldn’t find their regs.
“It is educational elitism to require trained, experienced, educated home birth midwives to complete additional expensive unnecessary education. Requiring additional education was just one way that the U.S. regulated “dirty” and “uneducated” granny midwives out of existence. Additional education does not make birth safer. Additional education means that poor women can’t access midwifery as a career choice to serve their community.”
Staten Island, NY—The images in worm, root, wort…& bane are part of a re-assemblage of fragments of old knowledge, and, in their ontology, invoke the persecution of wise women, witches, and wortcunners who kept plant knowledge safe, but whose understanding of plants and their connection with reproduction, in particular, represented a threat to capitalist and Christian power structures.
This body of work asks that we reconsider this complex nexus of reclaimed understanding; that we examine the continuing persecution of women, their gender roles and physical bodies in relation to this knowledge.
worm, root, wort…& bane engages with plant knowledge as a sphere in which politics have played out then and now, continuing to affect Western attitudes to women, to nature and to privilege. Put in the context of ecology, politics and intersectional feminisms, the current environmental emergency and the many impacts of our current high capitalist moment, these works signal a rupture that has taken place that has distanced us economically and spiritually from our environment and ultimately led to our current crisis.
Artist talk Saturday at 3.30 pm March 9th, at Alice Austen House.
THIS EXHIBITION IS SUPPORTED BY the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Richmond County Savings Foundation, Ruth Foundation For the Arts, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council
worm, root, wort… & bane –. Image Credit – Alice Austen House
BOOK LAUNCH 9 March from 2–5pm
worm, root, wort… & bane – a new book, of the same name, reassembles fragments of old knowledge to restore our relationship with plants
Alice Austen House Press, New York, is thrilled to announce the release of worm, root, wort… & bane, a new artist book by Aotearoa New Zealand artist Ann Shelton.
Part artist book and part scrapbook, photo book, quotography, and exhibition catalogue, worm, root, wort… & bane reassembles fragments of historical knowledge surrounding the medicinal, magical, and spiritual uses of plant materials — and the wise women, witches, and wortcunners who kept this knowledge safe. The book showcases this research alongside the first 19 artworks from i am an old phenomenon (2022-ongoing), a series of photographs of plant sculptures constructed by the artist.
Overflowing with 300+ images and quotations, this meticulously crafted book delves into the rich history of plant-centric belief systems, their suppression as Christianity spread and capitalism emerged in post-feudal Europe, and the estrangement between humans and the natural world that ensued. worm, root, wort… & bane situates us in this continuum, and points to the profound consequences of this distancing.
The book also features new essays by photographic curator Susan Bright and Victoria Munro, Executive Director of Alice Austen House, as well as The Three Fates, a short story by New Zealand writer Pip Adam.
An intersectional approach
worm, root, wort… & bane is the culmination of several years of research. It features a multiplicity of voices, reflecting the assorted and sometimes conflicting beliefs that are held about plants, gender, and sexuality. The book quotes historical accounts, herbal advice, folk knowledge, and artist research, and draws from art, literature, film, and television. This layered approach reflects the artist’s previous career as a press photographer, where it was custom to collect and paste up clippings of published images each day.
Ann Shelton’s work connects her ancestry in Scotland, Ireland, England, Italy, Northern and Eastern Europe, with her home in Aotearoa New Zealand. Shelton undertakes this as an artist, photographer, gardener, and forager, engaging with diverse perspectives, including pre-Christian, indigenous, queer, and ecological epistemologies. These perspectives intersect in worm, root, wort… & bane, revealing changing and overlapping cultural outlooks, beliefs, and biases.
worm, root, wort… & bane
By Ann Shelton
Publication date: March, 2024
Flexicover | 132 x 210 mm | 312 pages | ISBN 979-8-9888148-0-1
Available from The Alice Austen House Museum (US) and Rim Books (NZ)
Advance sales here:
https://alice-austen-house.square.site/shop/books/
https://www.rimbooks.com/wordpress/worm-root-wort-
Banner Image: Image: Ann Shelton, The oldest wort (mugwort, felon herb, Una, Artemisia, St. John’s plant, cingulum sancti Johannis, chornobylnik, beifuß, besenkraut, fliegenkraut, gänsekraut, Johannesgürtelkraut, jungfernkraut, sonnenwendkraut, weiberkraut, werzwisch, wilder wermut, wisch). Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Bamboo, 112 x 84 cm or 84 x 112 cm, from the series i am an old phenomenon, 2022 ongoing. Image Credit – AAH
Alice Austen House
The Alice Austen House is a national landmark located in Staten Island, and is operated by the Friends of Alice Austen House, and owned by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. The museum is open to the public, where the photographs of Alice Austen are on display, and there are also group tours and special events. From their website: “The Alice Austen House fosters creative expression, explores personal identity, and educates and inspires the public through the interpretation of the photographs, life and historic home of pioneering American photographer, Alice Austen (1866-1952).”
There are no comments yet
Why not be the first