The Unloved (2025, ongoing)

Exhibition history 2025 PRAKSIS, Oslo, NO (solo); GASP, Amsterdam, NL (group); Atletika, Vilnius, LT (solo)

In The Unloved, the figure of the ‘weed’ is animated through a combination of film, photography, collage, text and ephemera that sits somewhere in the cracks between museum herbarium, Gothic fantasy, childhood fable and amateur theatre.

Entering the exhibition, two large silk collages intertwine ghostly narratives with botanical history. These photographic fabric prints layer pressed plant specimens from the herbarium at London’s Natural History Museum with archival photographs and documents of spectral stories tied toVictorian glasshouses. The selections are not random, they all depict plants such as the Mandrake, Mugwort, Pheasant’s Eye and Daffodil, each with a history of shifting cultural significance, once revered for their medicinal or mystical properties, only to be later dismissed as weeds. These botanical specimens merge with faded portraits and eerie traces of the past, referencing folklore, literature, and film, where the boundaries between the living and the spectral blur. We see glimpses of these plants appearing in iconic artworks, films and literature such as John Millais’s Ophelia, The Day of the Triffids and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

In the next room, an unsettling short video introduces us to a delicate plant stalk adorned with eyes, modeled after the haunting figure of Saint Lucy from Francesco del Cossa’s 15th Century painting. In a visual style reminiscent of Czech animations for children, the eyes of Lucy (voiced by Lithuanian actress Bernadeta Lukošiūtė) narrate a brief history of the presence of so-called ‘weeds’ in human life, from the mention of ‘thorns and thistles’ in Genesis through to the Victorian obsession with plant-hunting. Their focus is on who and what determines one to be a weed, and how Empire expansion led to a Gothic fantasy of plants as exoticised and fetishised Others.

Following these draped collages into the next gallery, they now become reference to theatre curtains or backstage partitions, as we hear the voice of an actor drawing us closer. Seated in what appears to be an abandoned theatre or cinema and dressed in an extravagant plant-like costume they recount stories of their acting career across stage and screen. Their specialty is playing the weed and their desirability as an actor is based on the fickle tastes of directors and audiences. They are an Outsider, an Other, and find their home amongst the resilient peers thriving on the margins. Remaining slippery, the film slides from this monologue into a series of increasingly hallucinatory vignettes, Gothic tales of sentient plants, vengeful ghosts and a theatre set ablaze. Our actor inhabits the role of narrator, recounting these stories to an empty theatre before giving way to the ghosts of the architecture in what becomes something close to a haunting, Lynchian dream.

Living in times characterised as the end of the world, The Unloved is an exploration of identity, transformation, and the resilience of the overlooked, inviting audiences to see beauty in the tenacity of what is often dismissed or despised.

Exhibition text from Atletika, Vilnius, 2025

Essay by Juliet Jacques

For centuries, the relationship between humans and nature was primarily adversarial. Within the natural world, we had the considerable advantage of being bipeds with opposable thumbs, and incredibly sophisticated communicatory abilities. But we were at the mercy not just of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, nor just those animals that could match us in a hunt, but also the infinite variety and complexity of vegetation, most obviously with its power to poison us. That vegetation could symbolically outrun and overrun us too, and the way for people to master it – as we did the natural world throughout the modern, industrial age – was to categorise and classify it, with those plants not desired in the gardens we cultivated written off as weeds.

Many of our contemporary liberation movements spring out of the modern mania to categorise things, as to way to formalise, justify and entrench the hierarchies that had emerged. What, ask Sam Williams and Felicia Honkasalo in The Unloved, if weeds could talk: would they demand an end to stigmatisation, to suppression? Would they indict human beings for extending their processes of domination all the way into the plant world? Would they, as the central character (voiced by Bernadeta Lukošiūtė, host of children’s radio and TV programmes in Lithuania) in The Ramifications of Botanical Desire does, see the local differences and attendant hypocrisy, in how the Victorians saw the British countryside as domesticated nature – something to celebrate in landscape paintings and Romantic poetry – and the countryside from Ireland to India as something to conquer and control?

Flower arrangement became competitive amongst the emerging Victorian suburban middle class: people wanted to be seen with exotic plants in their carefully curated gardens. Falling behind the fashion was bad enough; having a garden taken over by weeds – a category that had existed for centuries, so there was no excuse for not knowing about it – quite another. The state of people’s gardens came to indicate not just their social standing, but their qualities as a citizen. In the post-independence United States, a meticulously maintained lawn became a mark of responsibility and discipline; in the former colonial metropole, some level of asymmetry was a sign of a creative mind, but too much disorder showed laziness, unsociability or instability. Everywhere, though, the persistence of weeds, and their indifference to apparently superior human desires and demands, provoked frustration and fury amongst garden enthusiasts.

In The Unloved, the narrator addresses the treatment of weeds as unwelcome, unwanted living things. Lavinia Co-op – the legendary performer in the BLOOLIPS radical gay theatre group and Hot Peaches drag collective, and Gay Liberation Front activist and member, plays the plant-actor – reminiscent of Lindsay Kemp, star of the musical Flowers (though it was based on Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers rather than anything botanical), and talks about “the bodily need to inhabit new roles, to grow, to spread, to be seen”. We learn that Shakespeare “loved a weed”, writing, ‘With baleful weeds and precious juice flowers, the Earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb.’ The actor talks about how plant roles in plays “always get somewhat overlooked”, and receiving less attention on getting older and less (conventionally) beautiful. The only way to stay relevant – especially when having to compete for attention with actual deaths of actresses in horrific theatre fires, to which audiences were morbidly drawn – was to start playing villains: “bloodthirsty vegetables, plants with murderous intent, which move and kill at will … flesh-eating carnivorous houseplants, alien invaders”.

This gives voice to some repressed fears, which built on Gothic literary novels about ‘freakish bodies’, from Horace Walpole’s ghost story The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). These came to the fore as cultural works shifted from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) or The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which portrayed the garden as a place of beauty and imagination, to John Wyndham’s post-apocalyptic Day of the Triffids (1951) or Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors (1960), the basis for the popular musical, in which aggressive species of plant fed on human flesh. It’s tempting to see the more serious post-war works in this vein as a metaphor for Cold War fears about the spread of communism, and more recent ones as a commentary on climate change.

But what if we read them on a literal as well as metaphorical level? We know that for centuries, we have treated plants as completely subservient to our needs and condemned whole species of them to be an underclass, as we have animals, and indeed, huge groups of people? What if plants were to rise up against us, like the bourgeoisie in France in 1789, the proletariat in Russia in 1917, or the slaves in Haiti in 1791-1804? Could plants – and especially weeds – possibly do to us what we have done to them? Perhaps an uprising might start from a – quite reasonable – sense that human beings, and especially Victorian Britons, have a real nerve in calling other species ‘invasive’? Likely, it would end in them taking our cities; the difficulty in removing Japanese knotweed from anywhere it settles demonstrates their resilience and determination. In 2018, I visited Pripyat, the town built to serve the Vladimir Ilich Lenin nuclear plant in Chornobyl, just over 30 years since the infamous disaster. In the abandoned exclusion zone, weeds were everywhere, climbing up the massive Duga-1 radar structure and growing around the collapsing hospital, schools and supermarkets of Pripyat. However human and animal life ends – amidst an apocalyptic war, man-made climate change, an atmosphere-changing asteroid strike or volcanic eruption, or the Sun expanding to the point that it becomes unsustainable – history will end with the weeds inheriting the Earth.

Ultimately, The Unloved is not about revenge fantasies, but reconciliation. The works engage us in dialogue about the meaning, categorisation and treatment of the weed, and its wider ramifications – leaving its metaphorical connotations up to us. Above all, they ask us to look again at the unwanted and undesirable, and challenge us to love them, however radical an act that might seem.

– Juliet Jacques

Re-earthing the Weed Johan Höglund

The opening scene of Sam Williams and Felicia Honkasalo’s The Unloved presents an encounter with a spectacularly Gothic and lavishly organic figure who invites us to come ever closer, to listen: great secrets will be revealed. Amidst darts of lightning and the sound of thunder unfolds a story that is at the same time theatrical and botanical. At the centre of this story grows the weed.

The Weed and the Lawn

To understand the weed, one must first comprehend its antithesis: the lawn. The lawn was introduced into human landscaping in the seventeenth century, at the dawn of what is often called the Enlightenment. This was an age when, it was hoped, reason and order were to replace the chaos and superstition of the Middle Ages. The lawn served this purpose, within an aesthetic of landscape that aimed to bring order and symmetry to the natural world. Yet, in bringing order, it also brought ecological desolation. The lawn ideally consists of only one plant species: the bladed grass. Consequently, it engages the owner of the lawn in a local war on other types of plants. The lawn is constantly thirsty; it demands fertilizers, poisons, lawnmowers—it can only flourish through the ceaseless killing of weeds. A monoculture, it is devoid of the biodiversity central to any functioning ecosystem.

As any gardener knows, life emerges from the compost heap where weeds excised from the garden are dumped. This is where microbial life that supports a fertile soil is nurtured. Just as importantly, living weeds are central to the survival of pollinators and wildlife. From early spring to late autumn and sometimes even in the middle of winter, weeds teem with colourful or invisible flowers. Their roots dig deep, nurture the soil and attract bees and other insects: food for birds that nest in trees. Weeds resist all efforts to eradicate them. They stick around because they are “fabulously good at their jobs”. This is the nature of weeds. They grow in the peripheries of gardens between gaps in the stone slabs that connect our doors to the street; they infiltrate the sward of the lawn and encroach on the walls, balconies and roofs of houses and institutions. They look towards the sun, and the moment we take our eyes off them they erupt, spectacularly. If this were not the case, it would be the end of everything. Ecosystems function not in spite of what we define as weeds, but because of them.

Monocultures of the mind

The conformity that the lawn breeds is not only ecological, it is also social and cultural. At the time of its conception the lawn signified humanity’s imagined conquest of nature, but it also coincided with the expansion of the principle of private enclosure as an essential part of social relations. This was something new. For much of the Middle Ages, most land constituted what is called “the commons”: it was communally accessible and open to all farmers to graze and tend their animals. The enclosure movement transformed this social and economic relation to the land. Suddenly, it could be owned and compartmentalised. New fences and walls were built—not to protect settled communities from raiders, but to mark the borders of property. The lawn was in step with this development. It helped introduce new ways of being, thinking and relating to land; it marked a new kind of hierarchical social system.

At the time this new social and economic order emerged, the lawn was still exclusive and rare. It demonstrated a wealth so vast you could keep part of your property empty of vegetable plots, animal pens, dung piles and uninvited neighbours. In the wake of the economic boom of the 1950s, the fenced-in lawn became ubiquitous. It still marks a certain wealth, especially in poorer parts of the world, but it serves a primary function of enfolding people into middle-class rituals and the normative hierarchies that maintain this class. It is part of a social order that emerged from the very notion that land can and must be conquered, reshaped, owned and mastered, even if the process strips it of vibrant forms of life. Bourgeois lawn fetishism helps nurture what ecofeminist Vandana Shiva (1993) has called “monocultures of the mind”: the inability to think outside the box of the business-as-usual. Just as lawns are scoured of invasive weeds, minds are kept free of those species of doubt that might suggest alternatives to the daily grind, to the accelerating erosion of both ecological and social worlds, to heteronormality, and ownership. If such species of doubt are allowed to grow and spread, the wild may start to run riot in both gardens and minds.

Now, however, the business-as-usual must be called into question. Martin Parker (2022) defines weeds as “plants which fail to co-operate with the plans of human beings”. Thus, “it is from the viewpoint of the plan that the invasion of the wild becomes a problem”. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the existing social, economic and political order, and the monocultures of the mind that uphold it, are steering the planet towards economic and ecological ruin. What Parker calls the “plan” needs to change, and that means allowing wild thoughts to invade and weeds to grow; learning to love the thoughts, longings, dreams, desires and convictions that threaten the stability of the dominant social order.

Gothic and Weeds

Weeds grow stealthily, germinating in the soil’s Gothic darkness, propagating in secret and slinking into view. They lurk unseen, underground, as roots and rhizomes. They hide in the undergrowth, only vaguely sensed, things out of place. Sometimes, as in The Unloved, their form turns out to be spectacular and even, when we cannot tell if what sits before us is human or flora, grotesque. Confronted by this hybrid being and the facts of its strange life, we may feel uncomfortable, anxious, afraid, even lost.

This is the mode of the Gothic. When the Enlightenment attempted to envelop the world in light and order, it produced shadows where dark things grew. The neoclassical palaces (and their rolling lawns) established during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, firstly in Europe and then in North America, were temples to new knowledge, prosperity and reason. They housed governments, universities, banks and the inordinately wealthy, but they were (at times metaphorically, at times literally) built on the graves of Indigenous people and relied on proceeds from New World slave plantations, mines where labourers toiled in darkness, or factories manned by children. When the Gothic emerged as a new genre of literature, art and architecture in the late eighteenth century it registered precisely this disturbing darkness, troubling the monocultures of the mind that made colonial violence seem reasonable in an age supposedly governed by democracy and equality. Gothic scholars Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumpsty (2026) argue that this version of the Gothic recycled earlier Gothic images and stories from the peripheries, the places most sharply exposed to the physical and ideological violence that made the great houses possible. Thus, the early British Gothic text invited the weeds of the imperial periphery into itself, where they grew and flowered, and—on the wind, in the crannies of coat pockets, in the holds of ships—spread further across the world.

Unlike many other genres, the Gothic does not systematically conflate the unloved and the unwanted. Rather, in Gothic fiction, horror films or pulp magazines, the “weed” is allowed to take centre stage. Sometimes it is a ghastly monster that devours the agents of white, heteronormative masculinity. In his 1988 book Imperial Gothic Patrick Brantlinger outlines the role of the unloved weed as a source of dark horror, a specimen that will be violently eradicated at the grand conclusion of the Gothic text. Bram Stoker’s Dracula concludes in this way; a gang of white men, calling themselves the “crew of light”, cut down the Count’s unloved, shape-changing body. Against this, there is a strain of the Gothic which celebrates the weed’s role in binding the world together and recognises the agencies that protect and propagate it. In M. R. Carey’s 2014 novel The Girl with All the Gifts, the pre-adolescent, fungal zombie hybrid Melanie is not the true monster of the story. She is the bright weed that will usher in the future, following the fall of the dystopian, decaying militarised state that forms the novel’s backdrop—even though her kind likes to feed on human beings.

Like the weed, the Gothic does not encourage conformity. Even the stories that turn the uninvited and unloved into monsters and cast their destruction as a form of liberation necessarily have to recognise the uninvited and unloved’s presence. The Gothic world is never a place of only one species of thought, so it is only natural that The Unloved teems with references to the genre’s central texts. The best instances of the Gothic help us recognise and embrace our own hybrid natures. They invite resistance and change. They help us to rewild our imagination and our sense of self. A change of behaviour is always preceded by a change of thought. As The Unloved reminds us, “all monsters are our distant relatives after all”.

Arts of Noticing

In her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), anthropologist Anna Tsing advocates what she terms “arts of noticing”. These are practices that refuse the perception of nature as a mere backdrop to human activity. Tsing points out that the ceaseless collaboration of billions of species is what makes life on this planet possible. These collaborations give rise to fundamentally queer, multispecies assemblages constituted by viruses, bacteria, algae, fungi, insects, fish, birds, mammals and weeds, life forms that exist only because they co-exist. Our human bodies participate in this rambunctious orgy of life-making in many different ways. We depend on these assemblages for oxygen, water and food, while acting as host to trillions of bacteria and other microbes that live in our guts, our skin, our brains—all over us. These microbes were once thought of as dangerous weeds, but without them our immune systems, and then our bodies, would quickly wither and expire. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in 1878, a weed is a “plant whose virtues have not been discovered”; we now know that many of the plants we think of as weeds are essential to the planetary ecosystem and even to the working of our own bodies. By adopting the arts of noticing we can come to appreciate these connections. Once we do, our understanding of the role that weeds play, the workings of the planet and the place of human beings on it dramatically shifts.

The Unloved engages us in a similar practice. Through it, we come to know the weed as an entity that secretly grows in darkness but also dazzles on stage: for example, in the form of the wildflowers that drift downriver with Hamlet’s Ophelia, or the monstrous flesh-devouring species that light up the most spectacular of B-movie horror films. Playwrights such as Shakespeare may have loved his weeds, the minor characters, but he rarely allowed them to take centre stage. In contrast, The Unloved is a figure that creeps in from the margins. No grand play can do without these seemingly peripheral figures, and no actor can resist the artificial sun that radiates from the stage lights—even if it sets them on fire.

In this work, it is both this seasoned performer and a fabulous, queer amalgamation of human and weed that beckons us, the children of the light, to come closer, and a little bit closer still, because there is a story we need to be told and secrets we must learn. We should heed the call, come closer and learn these secrets, because to do so is to practice the art of noticing: in particular, how The Unloved grows within our own selves. We must not attempt to excise this ingrowth with poison or harsh words. To do so would be to practice unforgivable, ruinous violence not just to the weed but to ourselves. Rather than pursue conformity, we should search our souls for the opportunity to love what grows in the shade and longs for release; to love The Unloved. In such love there is hope.

References

Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Cornell University Press. Duncan, Rebecca, and Rebekah Cumpsty. 2026. The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic Literature. Edited by Duncan, Rebecca, and Rebekah Cumpsty. Cambridge University Press. Parker, Martin. 2022. "Weeds: Classification, Organization, and Wilding." Organization Theory 3 (4):26317877221131580.
Shiva, Vandana. 1993. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. Zed Books. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.