Growing Together

T he very nature of ecological thinking requires conversation and community. It’s through the process of hearing—or even imagining our ways into—other perspectives that we can begin to see the world beyond our individual experiences. Multiple minds generate more possibilities and nuance than one alone. And in this regard, I’m quite fortunate to find myself surrounded by so many others who are thinking deeply about our relationships to the other-than-human world.

Artist and maker, Molly Koehn, is one of those people. Furthermore, she has a particularly generative creative practice and philosophical perspective when it comes to helping reimagine our collective interactions with nature. Working through repetitive processes spanning printmaking, weaving, and fiber-based sculptures and installations, Molly has honed an intimate and embodied understanding about what it means to work, relate with, and learn from plants—especially in service of deepening our collective connection to our immediate ecologies. 

I was delighted to have had the chance to converse with Molly about her personal relationship with plants in her studio, where she is perpetually surrounded by a robust stockpile of hand-harvested plant materials, not to mention her various sculptures, baskets, weavings, and textiles that she creates from these—and other—fibers, dyes, and matter. As I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s always a pleasure conversing about how plants inform her work, outlook, and lifestyle. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

[Jake Eshelman] I have the benefit of knowing you quite well, but for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting you, I wonder if you could briefly introduce yourself and your work?

[Molly Koehn] I’m from a rural farming community in southwest Kansas, which is very agricultural. Lot of wheat, corn, alfalfa, soy—mostly all grown for cow feed, for meat production. Though my family works in agriculture, I didn’t work on the farms; I didn’t go out in the combines or have much of a hand in it all. But even though I wasn’t directly involved, I was around plants all the time. And I was plugged into the timing of the seasons. For example: knowing when to plant or harvest and so on. I grew up in the culture, so we were always looking at the fields and wondering about the crops and how they were doing. 

I was also one of those kids where being an artist was always the option. I knew for a long time that I was going to be an artist. My grandmother was one, and my family in general is creative. For undergrad, I went to a small school in the middle Kansas (Fort Hays State University) where I studied drawing. My advisor and main professor there, Amy Schmierbach, had an open-minded of what drawing was, and she encouraged me to start weaving. We actually learned how to weave together, which was quite magical. I then went to graduate school at Arizona State specifically to study fibers as an art form. I then came to Houston roughly seven years ago for an artist residency at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and I never left Houston. 

So that’s the very standard, CV-style answer to your question. But the deeper aspect of who I am and how I work is that in each place where I’ve lived and worked, I’ve created a practice of intimately exploring my immediate natural surroundings. In undergrad, I could do this by car because the landscape was so accessible. I could just go down dirt roads—late at night, early in the day, whenever. I was interested in what was in the landscapes, from the plants and animals to the abandoned farms and homesteads. It was the same when I lived in Arizona, though it was a little harder to access the countryside because there were fewer roads. As a result, I turned to hiking as a way to experience the environment, which was much more intimate. And that’s where I really started to forage natural materials from the landscape to use in my work. I’ve continued that place-based exploration process here in Houston, where I’ve picked up kayaking and birding as hobbies because I couldn’t find another way to get out into ‘nature’. So much of the landscape here is water-logged to where you can’t walk out into it. And my concept of hiking had to really change here because there’s no elevation gain. [laughter].  So I picked up birding, which has been a great way to get me out into the environment, which has helped me begin to understand the concept of tree-cover, which is so foreign to me compared to what I grew up with in southwestern Kansas, where there aren’t really any trees—just open sky for miles.

That puts things into context for me because I feel like you’re always out in the swamps and the forests here. Looking for birds. Foraging plants. And so on. 

[Laughter]. It’s not always, it’s just pretty much the only thing I ever actually post. But it is truer this time of year since it’s migration season. 

One of the things that’s been so astounding for me in Houston is the diversity of life. There is always something new blooming, growing, moving somewhere. I notice new species all the time. And that kind of diversity is something that took me a really long time to get used to. I almost didn’t even want to start learning what the plants were because there are just so many here. It felt so overwhelming.

And yet, you did… 

I couldn’t help it. That process of engaging nature and meeting plants… it’s all a fundamental aspect of how I come to know a place through my work. 

“Working with plants is a way of feeling alive.” — Molly Koehn

I want to touch on that a bit. As artists, we have countless materials at our disposal to work with—and one of the things I enjoy most about you is that you always seem to have plant matter in your hands—spinning, weaving, and so on. Could you talk a bit about why you like to use plants in your work—and perhaps share a bit about your relationship with plants in general? 

Absolutely. My interest in plants has always been there, especially from what I would call a soil-to-product cycle. Witnessing or being a part of that full transformation is really meaningful to me. Seeing that process full circle grounds me. In my mind, there’s no question: if I have access to source a material that grows directly from the ground, I’m going to see what I can do with it.

But fast forward to this moment in particular as an artist and maker, part of the reason that I’m interested in working with plants stems from my experiences as a resident at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. They have a whole craft garden specifically devoted to growing plant materials for dyeing, basketry, and fiber. I didn’t work with the garden much as a resident, but a few years later, a friend of mine decided she was going to start using these materials in her work—and I followed. It started small; harvesting a few things here and there and figuring out how to work with them through trial and error, or by accessing information online. I’m a learn-by-doing kind of person, so it’s been a lot of fun working with the plants. For example, some of the videos I find online aren’t in English, so I have to rely on my existing knowledge and then studio experiments to really figure out how to work with each plant to leverage their unique qualities. 

Because plants grown in the HCCC craft garden are cultivated to be used, it offers incredible access to a wide variety of different plants to work with: ramie, jute, banana, and so many others. Each one takes a different type of processing. You have to learn what each plant wants and needs. By contrast, the textile industry is obsessed with cotton. And in being able to work with other types of fibers, I was shocked that I could process them just as easily as cotton. It’s not as soft, so I get that. But for me it’s more about broadening our perspective of what’s possible and thinking outside of the box so we can celebrate diversity instead of finding something that works and just digging in our heels. That sacrifices other possibilities, which is a shame.   

Anyway, the skill and confidence I gained from being able to work with these various materials from the HCCC craft garden helped me to start engaging with the plants that grow here in Houston. It helps me recognize or imagine what I could do with these endemic species. And that’s caused me to build a stronger connection with this place. I was in the thicket the other day recognizing some plants here and there, and then recognizing the lichen growing on the trees, and all of the sudden I was overwhelmed by this realization that everything is alive. It’s a thought I’ve had before. I’ve known it, really. But there’s something different in the moment when you feel it in your body. You can feel all of yourself in tune with all the life around you. If I wasn’t working with my hands and experiencing the world in this embodied way, I wouldn’t have had that moment. 

“I believe that working with your hands is a beautiful way to gain knowledge and connect with your community.”  — Molly Koehn

Are there any specific plants you have a particularly intimate relationship with?

There are a couple that come to mind. I love using the plants here in the environment because that process amplifies the connection I feel with the land and how it sustained all life here in symbiotic ways. Indigenous cultures here are amazingly attuned to how to use local plants for various purposes. From my research, I find that it’s empowering to look at a plant and know that I can make a pair of sandals or a bag out of it. What a beautiful connection to have with the people who came before me. It’s around us all the time, but we don’t tap into it. We’re so disconnected from that knowledge and relationship. So for me, working with plants is a way of feeling alive. 

But to answer your question, I’ll start with ramie, which is a type of nettle native to Japan with long fibers. Pretty much whenever I’m in meetings, I’m sitting there spinning ramie into thread that I could eventually weave into a textile. I probably never will, but I could—and that excites me. 

I also love rattlesnake master, which is similar to yucca because it has long slender leaves that native peoples here would use in a variety ways. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed researching this because I’ve been able to find images showing how the plant was transformed into shoes or bags. And at the same time, it can also be split to create many different weights of thread. So it’s versatile, and I love discovering those possibilities. 

My other favorite is umbrella sedge. It’s native to Africa and is in the same family as papyrus, with similar qualities. I like working with it because I’ve followed my own path of building knowledge and experimentation. I saw that Tim Johnson was teaching a workshop on Ugandan grasshopper collecting bags, which was being taught abroad, so I wasn’t able to take it. But just looking at the images and description of the class, I realized the plant looked remarkably similar to umbrella sedge. And when I read that stems were split to make the baskets, I had so much prior experience with similar materials and processes that this immediately unlocked so much new knowledge about how I could use this new plant. And it was perfect, because at that time, I was actively looking for local plant materials I could forage, grow, and use to make my work instead of having to source them from a store that in turn just gets their materials from far-off places that I have no embodied relationship with. All of the sudden, I could enact the entire process myself, here. There’s even a patch of it growing through the sidewalk next to the highway close to the center of the city. And I love that spirit of it too. That it’s resolute and triumphant. I really enjoy moments like that where nature breaks through and thrives, especially in urban areas. 

[Laughter] It’s almost like nature’s tiny, green middle finger busting through the concrete. 

Exactly. It’s pretty punk.

I feel like that’s a great segue into another aspect about your work with plants that I’d like to explore. I personally feel like we find teachers—or at least teaching moments—everywhere. And I wonder if plants have taught you anything? Have they cracked open any new pathways into how you see or understand the world? 

I’ve been having some illuminating conversations recently with a few people I work with, who told me that I wasn’t really that ‘chill’. I’m pretty sure they meant it as a compliment because I’m good at staying on task and getting things done, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently and realize that the times in which I am undeniably chill is when I’m outside in nature.  

It wasn’t directly communicated to me from plants themselves, but I actually learned a lot about this aspect of myself from alligators. They are, in fact, super chill. Just hanging out in the water. They can go months without eating. They don’t want to, but they can. As a kayaker in Houston, I see gators all the time. I was out at Sheldon Lake and saw the most gators I’ve ever seen in a single location—all at least 7’ long. Big ones. Amazing. And they’re minding their own business. Chilling. And here I am floating parallel to one of them. We’re just drifting. No cares in the world. I’m not even paddling or anything. The water’s super calm. It’s a beautiful day. And we’re both just drifting along at the exact same speed. And in that moment, I was like, ‘I am a gator.’ [laughter] So being in this environment, surrounded by tree canopy and water, it’s a different feeling for me. It’s like a hug or a shelter—or a womb even. The whole ecosystem between the plants and the birds and the gators, it’s all what I would call very ‘slow living’. Embracing what’s there. Being present. So it’s not just that plants who have taught me the virtue of slow living; it’s the entire ecosystem.  

That’s beautiful. I also think it’s fair to say that the average, everyday person doesn’t always think deeply about plants—how they nourish us, help us, harm us, and so on. Plants surround us all the time—we can’t live without them—and yet they seem to stay in the periphery of our collective consciousness. And I say this without judgement, but I often wonder how our world might change if we thought about plants differently. Is there anything that you wish people thought or understood about plants that might change how we interact with them, or nature as a whole? 

Yes. For me it goes back to that transcendent experience I mentioned earlier where I realized that everything is alive. At the same time, I started wondering how people would change if we all realized that—even down to things we don’t usually assign life. I did a residency in Colorado Springs where I got really into rocks, and started thinking about the life of rocks, which, by the way, what a life they have. Or even thinking about the life of water. So, if we thought of everything as alive, we would behave totally differently. We’d offer so much more reverence. Although, it’s also easy at this point to think that we don’t hold life in that much regard, but I think we would have stronger community connections. It’s something I’m interested in cultivating through working with plants. 

There’s agency that comes through knowledge. Just simply knowing that YOU can make something out of a plant. That this plant interacts with another in a certain way, so that this thing happens. Or that this animal eats this plant. It’s a catalyst to learn more about our surroundings. If we’re only attuned to a small sliver of our world, our perspective is extremely limited. But when we can start to recognize all the threads that weave all life together, we suddenly start to see ourselves as an integral part of a vast interconnected system. And that’s where we experience more awe, happiness, and curiosity, which are all so important.

So if I’m understanding correctly, plants help us recognize or even build relationships? 

A hundred percent. And I believe that working with your hands is a beautiful way to gain knowledge and connect with your community. As a part of my practice looking forward, I’m thinking about ways to build more agency and relationships by sharing knowledge of how we can work with plants. I want to create contexts in which people can feel more comfortable and interested in connecting to the land and the plants that grow around them. And working with the plants directly, with our hands, is a great place to start. 

Ironically, that seems like a great note to end on, because I want to ensure that people know how to learn more about and support your work. What’s the best way for people to do that? 

You can get a sense of my work by visiting my website and following along on Instagram, where I share information about my upcoming exhibitions, courses, and workshops. I also post a lot of the birds and plants I’m excited about in Houston, so if you’re into that, I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m also playing around with some open community workshops where I’ll post up in a park or along the bayou at a specified time to invite anyone to sit down and make bags with me using plants I’ve harvested. Should be a good time. So maybe I’ll see you or some of the readers there!

Jake Eshelman is the Contributing Editor of Ecological Thinking at Plantings,  He is a photo-based artist and visual researcher exploring the complex relationships between humans, the environment, and everyone we share it with. You can learn more about his work, writings, lectures, and publications online and via Instagram.