Quadrifolium (2020) fabric, thread, 121.92 x 200 cm (48” x 78.75”)
Quadrifolium was shown at Belle Beau in Arles as part of the Rencontres in 2021 and the inauguration exhibition the Rose Garden.
The Quadrifolium
The chances of finding a four-leaf clover (trifolium, normally) in the wild is about 1 in 10,000 and is often associated with good luck. In folklore a clover forager is also believed to be someone who knows where the witches and fairies are. Edward Martin currently holds the record for finding the most four-leaf clovers, a total of 111,060 collected from 1999 — he is known only for this collection “I’m just lucky,” he said. “I have no education to amount to anything beyond a couple years of high school. My kids are not burdens to society,” he said — according to the Chicago Tribune1. There is also George Kaminski who found 72,927 four-leaf clovers while serving time in a Pennsylvania prison.
Three photographes from the Clovers series : Clover 1-16 (2019) inkjet print, 27.94 x 29.21 cm
From left to right : 48.891082, 2.221874, 45.51715, -73.58635, 50.823845, 4.334820
A selection of photographs were shown at Belle Beau in Arles as part of the Rencontres in 2021 and the inauguration exhibition “the Rose Garden”. They were also show in the group show Transitions at Galerie Mansart in 2021.
In 2017 I collected twelve four-leaf clovers and four five-leaf clovers that I documented in a series of photographs, titled by their GPS location. This experience has expanded into a larger project, exploring the meaning of plants, their root systems and networks. Since then my collection has expanded to over 120 clovers including 4s, 5s and a 9 leafer. Their location of discovery has been documented by their coordinates and can be found on a map accessible online.
Vincent Van Gogh said every artist has a flower. He wrote to his brother naming three mostly now forgotten artists “You may know that the peony is Jeannin’s, the hollyhock belongs to Quost, but the sunflower is mine in a way.”2 And the clover is mine. This is not just because of my strange ability to find these oddities, but also because their root system is a rhizome.
The rhizome root system, which sends out roots horizontally from their nodes, is an adventitious system and a means for the clover to multiply. This means that a four-leaf is often part of a larger plant. Unlike the popularized conception of the rhizome however, there is a central hub. The central hub is its strength. Remove that central hub, and the nodes die — like most systems of power. Looking at technological systems, the clover’s root system has become my preferred metaphor for the surveillance society we live in.
Three pieces from the Mouti-Mouti series : Mouti-Mouti 1-10 (2019) thread on fabric, 27.94 x 29.21 cm
From left to right : *69 VS Shanti JI, International transfer fee VS Sharmily, Mechanical Embroidery VS Bharti
This system can also be understood as a “string figure” as described by Donna Haraway, “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come.”3
Napoleon was known to have been one of the greatest generals in history and was famous for his ability to make a decision at battle with a “clin d’oeil,” or blink of an eye. What is often not mentioned is that he was in possession of a hot air balloon, he had surveillance technology. The trifolium roots system allows the plant to be in multiple places at the same time, much like modern surveillance technologies.
The acts of decoding through mapping are described by Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s writings on the Rhizome. As a new image of thought “that overturns the model and outlines a map.” Using the root system of the same name they describe their theory and research as one that allows multiple non-hierarchical ideas; thus an Illustration for a system of thought through mapping and non-binary choice. This description of the Rhizomes are a perfect description of many systems we interact with today, and Deleuze and Guattari were precociously aware that these new systems can “give rise to despotic channels,”4 and as artist Tom Sherman articulated perfectly: “hierarchical relationships do not have to be vertical in nature – they can of course be horizontal.”5
Napoleon’s Clin d’oeil (2019) jacquard, 66 x 87 cm │ “Napoleon’s Clin d’oeil 1-2” (2019) inject print, 30 x 20 cm
Napoleon’s Clin d’oeil was shown at Belle Beau in Arles as part of the Rencontres in 2021 and the inauguration exhibition the Rose Garden.
The chances of finding a four-leaf clover was about 1 in 10,000, until in 2010 when the University of Georgia in Athens and Samuel Roberts Noble foundation in Ardmore, Oklahoma, believed they found the four-leaf gene and made the plant available on the commercial market. In 2018 I purchased three of these plants from a local plant market in Montreal. I washed the plant to expose its roots and photographed the specimens. The image of these plants with their roots exposed was then rendered into a jacquard. I then manually embroidered the plant’s leaves back to their original appearance as a way to highlight how meaning can be lost through a photograph or digital representation.
The trifolium is now joined by the quadrifolium through cross breeding technologies. The morphologies that creates four, five, six, and record holder 56 leafer was mapped by SSR (Simple Sequence Repeats) DNA was extracted from young leaves and used to genotype a mapping population. This with the recent leap in biology, the invention of CRISPR, will make these types of intervention only easier. Therefore, does the quadrifolium, unlike the four-leaf trifolium, propose a new meaning of chance, one that is made instead of found?
Three drawing from the clover series : Clover 1-7 (2019) ink on paper, 27.94 x 29.21 cm
The map showing all the clovers I have found can be found (here)
[1] George, Jason (March 17, 2008) “160,000? That’s a lot of luck” Chicago Tribune, — https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm- 2008-03-17-0803160132-story.html
[2] Vincent van Gogh (to Theo) “Letter 573”, 22 or 23 January 1889
[3] Deleuze, Gilles, et Guattari, Félix “Capitalisme et schizophrénie; Mille Plateaux” Paris,
France: Les Éditions de Minuit 1980, p. 31.
[4] Sherman, Tom “Primary Devices” IInformation.Cambridge /Massachusetts: The MIT
Press / London / United Kingdom : 2016, p. 96.
[5] Donna Haraway ”Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” NC: Duke University Press, 2016., p. 2
