An industrial embroidery machine advances at an industrial pace. Which plant motif to summon, where on the garment to place it, at what scale, in which colors of thread—compositional decisions accumulate, one garment at a time.
The material I choose is secondhand clothing—garments that have already passed through another context, through someone's body, accumulating marks on their surface. Rather than erasing what is already there, I layer over it. What I summon is a fictional plant motif: bearing stems, petals, a tendency to cluster—fulfilling every condition of plant-life while remaining unidentifiable as any existing species. To depict a known species would be to let that plant's cultural memory enter the work. What I need is only the temporal texture of plant-ness, stripped of meaning—the rhythm of growth, circulation, and slow overwriting.
The pace of the machine and the time of plants move in opposite directions. That contradiction remains unresolved, fixed onto a single garment. On this garment, at least three tenses exist simultaneously: the past accumulated in the secondhand clothing, the present of the marks already there, and a time not yet arrived, indicated by plant motifs that have no name. They carry no resolution—remaining unsolved, continuing to overlap.
