Eerie Beans - 2nd journal to Art Arcaeology of Runner Beans

This post carries on a project journal about UK runner bean ecosystems. Reasons for a new chapter range from the seasons progressing from summer to autumn with the beans entering a different stage of life as their tissues decay in the colder temperatures. The project has developed as I’ve started to seek ways of sharing it. And the last post, let’s face it, was getting hefty.

Update 14th October

I signed off the growing phase journal, but of course there is more. 

I’ve been reading Timothy Morton‘s book Humankind, and now I can speak in overlapping and spectral worlds. Which is clearer in the beans prolonged dying, although we should not speak of life and death as separate stages of a whole life, as they are not, and life isn’t whole either, but rather, it contains holes. 

The beans have become more overlapped with the other lives in the garden; becoming more transparent; leaves which filter sunlight, becoming, slowly, part of the soil. Another very important world here too. I photographed uprooted stems drying over the washing line with a single child’s sock I pegged there. Our worlds overlapped. Through them I become more connected to this place. Through me, they become more connected too.

Project documentation.

I should explain that one of the ways in which his project has moved, a recent realisation, is that the beans through their detachment by humanity from their native ecosystem are isolated. I was looking upon their verdant red blooms a lack of insects. They lack hummingbirds.  They lack their long-tongue moths. They lack their bees. They have some co-species, but not enough. Theirs bees they do have had to be lured by a lavender plant. This is an eerie ecosystem; a zombiefied version of what it should be. Hence, I renamed the project ‘Erie Beans’