How To Find A Palm Tree began as a poem that emerged from free-talking sessions between Jasmine and Justine, and became the foundation for a world-building experiment. The world invoked affirms the fraught burdens of needs, weaknesses, desires and contradictions, especially for selves formed with and through diminishment, erasure, restriction and violence. It honours journeys of becoming full of wrong turns, rest stops, backtracking and hesitation, and is itself an oscillating project, created from years of dialogue and iterative transfers between artists. “How To Find A Palm Tree” summons and celebrates selves that are always moving toward, but never complete.

ARTIST BIOS

Justine Wong is a multimedia artist and illustrator whose work is guided by the patterns and language of water. Her work reflects the conversations between the artist and the wild self and its processes, like the way a storm breaks, or the build of a snail’s shell. Through intuitive painting, ceramics, plant medicine, and plant cultivation, she works to illuminate entrances back to old ways of knowing. Primarily a watercolor artist, she is currently practicing as a spiritual herbalism apprentice, where she continues to deepen her exploration of what it means to create from the power of fluidity.

Jasmine Gui is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and arts programmer working in decolonial imaginaries and communal memory. She explores the material and spatial possibilities of poetry through image and mark-making techniques such as collage, found and blackout, paper-making and paper-cutting. She runs Teh Studio and San Press, spaces that foreground slow intent as radically political and urgent interventions in the narratives we tell. The author of two chapbooks, she collaborates on experimental paper arts as one-half of the creative duo, jabs and is currently working on her PhD at York University.

Image ID: Photograph of white, speckled Japanese paper treated with konnyaku starch, bearing colourful watercolour marks and paper cuts that rise and fall like waves. Sitting on top of the paper is an assortment of ceramic objects including flat tiles with patterned imprints of leaves and lace, and various sizes of stones and seeds.

Documentation by Alison Postma