How to Make a Bomb and Battlefield: The Garden as a Site of Critique and Care

Kate Rhodes:

Hello, Gabriella.

Gabriella Hirst:

Hey.

Kate Rhodes:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this chapter of Form x Content presented by Monash Art, Design and Architecture and programmed by Monash University Museum of Art. My name is Kate Rhodes and I'm thrilled to be speaking with artist Gabriella Hirst. For audiences who are listening and would like a visual description, I have brown hair, a fringe and I'm wearing black. It's nearly six o'clock in the middle of winter so it's getting darker and darker outside. I'm at my local library, Bargoonga Nganjin, which means 'Gather Everybody' in Woiwurrung, the language of the Wurundjeri, the Traditional Owners of the unceded lands I'm on, and so very appropriate for us recording a conversation to share with others. I'd also like to pay my respects to Elders past and present. I'm curator at State Library Victoria and I'm completing a PhD in the Architecture and Curatorial programs at Monash University. I'm also a gardener and Gabriella, who is speaking from her home in Berlin at nearly 10 o'clock in the morning, takes this description of gardener to new and fascinating places that we'll explore in this conversation. Gabriella, can I hand over to you to introduce yourself?

Gabriella Hirst:

Thank you so much, Kate. Yes. I'm Gabriella Hirst. I'm an artist. I am in Berlin so right on the other side of the world. Visual description, I am wearing a black shirt, I have dark hair, I'm against a white backdrop in some muted morning light. I'm really looking forward to this conversation about gardening and care and all the rootings, weavings and diggings in between. Thank you so much for having me.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah, that's right. We've been invited here onto your screens to discuss Gabriella's recent project, How to Make a Bomb, and the way in which she engages the garden as a site of critique and care as a form of control, and perhaps mundanely as maintenance. Gardens are certainly entwined with care and when we think about its connection to humility, empathy, practicality and patience, but even more fresh than How to Make a Bomb is Gabriella's related project, Battlefield. We're going to start there today. Gabriella, you opened the current iteration of Battlefield, it's a project you actually started in 2014, just last week at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, which is about a three-hour train trip, you told me from, where you are now in Berlin. Can you describe Battlefield for people who might not know it? Introduce us to some of the vast and complex terrain that you're exploring like, as you said, the cultural and historical entanglement of gardening, military violence, nuclear colonialism and plant naming amongst other ideas, and maybe take us back to the beginning, too, about where this idea comes from.

Gabriella Hirst:

Great, yes. Where to start with Battlefield is always a bit complicated because it is a really leaky project that is about continued maintenance and continued care and doesn't... Part of the issue but also the core of it, is that it is unresolvable and that's the point of it. Yeah, I'll start with how I began it. Actually, maybe with a small anecdote that we had vaguely discussed beforehand, but I grew up on Cammeraygal land in Sydney and my dad... We had a big backyard. My dad had this, and still has this, habit of whenever we'd get back home or even on the hottest mid-summer day, first thing in the morning he would go out into the garden and with a range of tools, shears, an arsenal of gardening tools. He would go out into the garden and then at a certain point he would come back covered in tick bites and scratches and he'd just like... And sweating and he would just bandage himself up and then just have a big glass of water and just go straight back out to combat-

Kate Rhodes:

He was really selling gardening to you as a pursuit.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, so I really wasn't a gardener as a child because it wasn't appealing, but it definitely had this sense of going into conflict with the garden.

Kate Rhodes:

It must have been consuming. He was obviously very intensely dedicated.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because of that, we always had a very beautiful garden that was the result of his constant physical labour into this place. This is, of course, wrapped up in so many... In the case of Australia, wrapped up in so many ideas of, I guess, conquering a place that is perhaps not understood and needs to be managed and organised within a colonial way, but it's also more complicated than that as well because it is perhaps about care and about caring for your environment. It's mixed up in that place between conquest and care and settler colonial identity in Australia, and of course I grew up with the backdrop as well on the TV of things like Backyard Blitz and Gardening Australia, that shift between a very kinder approach to looking at plants and the language of warfare to blitz the kind of... To totally overhaul a space.

Kate Rhodes:

Yes, yeah. Annihilate and change.

Gabriella Hirst:

Exactly. There are so many avenues to go with in introducing my interest in the relationship between gardening and conflict as two ways of thinking about habitat. But yeah, that's... I guess if I had to think about that, that's one starting point, but Battlefield itself as an ongoing research project that I've been doing since 2014 began when I moved to Europe and I came across this plant called Verdun. It's a rose called Verdun. I had, as, Kate I'm sure you did too, had this deep indoctrination into the history of World War I as being a stalwart of history teaching. I remember doing a minute of silence for World War I, it was almost a hundred years later, and just thinking about World War I as part of the upkeep of an Australian colonial identity.

So I knew a disproportionate amount of information about the Battle of World War... About the Battle of Verdun when I turned up age 23 in France. I had statistics and facts and I also knew about it as a place, as a battle that had been a real battle of the earth that was fought over a very small area of land. There were periods of time in this bloody conflict where three acres of land were mashed backwards and forwards and composted with weaponry and with bodies. When I found out about this rose that was made in 1918 that was called Verdun, I was just super curious about what this rose was. I knew that there was this family by internet research that were trying to bring this rose back into circulation in line with the 100 years anniversary of Verdun.

I ended up visiting Verdun, staying with this family who were really lovely and starting to think about how histories of a place, in this case the city of Verdun, but also of an almost 100-year-old act of war or conflict, how they are memorialised through planting and through gardening, and in this case through the story of this particular rose, this one particular rose being revived. In visiting Verdun, it all came together because the place where the battle of that happened, there are forests there that were not there before the war. They were planted over the site of this conflict and then engineered to have the characteristics of a forest that's now 300 years old instead of 100 years old, so considering forestry as a form of gardening as well through which history is managed and through which violence has either pushed away or kept close, but how memory is tended to, and statecraft is created through gardening. These are all the things that started coming together through this small little pink rose that I brought... After visiting Verdun, I was gifted one, took it home, was not great at gardening. It died because I tried to keep it in my flat because I had not learned how to garden from my dad at that point. I've since learnt-

Kate Rhodes:

There's something quite poetic, I guess, about that rose dying maybe, too, and sort of the go full cycle with the-

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, exactly because you have this monument that you suddenly feel this responsibility for and even if you're like, "I don't want to be the custodian and caretaker of a World War I battle," somehow you are wrapped up in that.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You become a part of the piece of the story.

Gabriella Hirst:

Exactly. Whether or... You're responsible for this plant which is just a nice little plant that, as it's a cultivated rose, particularly if you're keeping inside, not advisable, is really dependent on you to water it and look after it.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Those mundanities of maintenance.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah. You find yourself being this caretaker of a monument but the monument is so fragile in a way, and yet it scratches you and you try and prune it and... Yeah. But anyway, so-

Kate Rhodes:

Well, this is exemplary, isn't it, of Battlefield?

Gabriella Hirst:

Totally, totally. Then I got another one and I needed to keep... I started expanding this research into other plants that are named after battles. I needed to keep them alive, I needed to do better than I had done with Verdun. I started collecting them and actually growing them on the Tempelhofer Feld, which is a... It's a former airport. It used to... It's a very loaded site. It used to be a parade ground during National Socialism, before that, it had older history during wars. It then became a civilian airport and most recently it became a public park. Again, the thing about making a loaded site into a park, it's always like, "What do we do with this violent place? I guess we'll make it into a park or a memory garden."

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Well, that's the thing, I guess. I mean, parks can be very contemplative spaces. I guess the forest in Verdun, in a way they enforce a sort of reflection, perhaps. You're lying on the grass or you're walking through the forest or you're... They are places that make us think, but whether we think about the past-

Gabriella Hirst:

I totally agree, but also it's that line between like, "Do they make you think or do they also just create the sight of peace?"

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

That in its own right-

Kate Rhodes:

They paste over things

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, or overgrow. Overgrow what is lying underneath. That's also... It's not a... There's a tension there, that it almost neutralises violence in a way to garden over it.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tries to transform it, I suppose.

Gabriella Hirst:

Exactly, yeah. Basically, I started gathering all these plants, doing more research into plants that were named after battles and warfare and expanded the gamut of what that meant to just include the language of the theatres of war in general, mainly European battles from 1500 up until the present day. Battlefield expanded and expanded. I actually left Berlin. In the meantime, the community gardeners there... Yeah. It was in the community garden on the Tempelhofer Feld. They were caring for them in my absence. I was going backwards and forwards. This project, I was always trying to find an outcome for it that it could be like because I was just going there and tending to it and doing sketches of these plants and always trying to think of something still that I could make to represent this research project. It always felt really dead if I tried to do that, it wasn't what the work was. The work was about, I guess, the performance project of being wrapped up in this process of caring for these weirdly named, often unpleasantly associated plants.

Kate Rhodes:

You were telling me about one called Margaret Thatcher. That must have been quite a hard plant to tend.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yes. Margaret Thatcher is... Yeah. All these stories started coming out through the gathering of these plants and the research of looking for them and trying to find out their names throughout all these just fascinating things. Margaret Thatcher is a gladiolus that was made in 2001, so really recently, by a Czech breeder, Petr Smida. I emailed Petr Smida and was like, "What's the story of the Margaret Thatcher gladiolus that you brought out last year?" His response... Actually, I can find it. Margaret Thatcher. So I've made this publication of Battlefield of all the plants, an index of all the plants. Margaret Thatcher is planted next to Falklands fuchsia made in 1984. But Petr Smida responded-

Kate Rhodes:

Perfect.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, and their roots are weaving together which I think is something. So Margaret Thatcher, Petr Smida's response was, "I can only inform you about my variety, Margaret Thatcher. I'm 37 years old so I have no experience in her political career as British prime minister but I have read her book and respect her as a right wing and conservative politician whose voice is missing from the current madness. I respect her as a charismatic and intelligent woman and I realise that there is no longer any political figure of her calibre. I therefore decided to dedicate to her at least my pink gladiolus which I selected in 2014."

Kate Rhodes:

Wow. I mean, really it does... It intensifies the project, doesn't it, to... And it gets around to this conversation about, "How do we discuss those things which repel us, how do we not push things to the side but bring them into the light in order to have it out with them, to have these discussions?" But a discussion in a way or a one-off work is one thing, but a plant is longterm. It's really an endurance piece.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, and Margaret Thatcher is going to be, hopefully, alive for... Am I really saying this sentence? Because that happens, I find myself saying things like, "Margaret Thatcher is forever." Then I'm like, "What sort of horrible person-"

Kate Rhodes:

Because of you.

Gabriella Hirst:

Because of me, and that's the thing. But I guess it would be the thing, if I was only raising Margaret Thatcher that would be one thing, but it's the bringing of all of these different plants together that I hope it becomes a weird performance research project where all of these plants have to place you in a complicated situation.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

Where something that... Some of these plants have these names that seem, I mean, maybe pompous but at least abstract in terms of their violence, so Unknown Warrior and that... The idea of the unknown warrior seems... The plant that I'm thinking about in particular is... I think it was a... I thought it was a Napoleonic one but then it wasn't because it was called Unknown Warrior in English. Anyway, it's from at least 100 years old and it has this romanticism of the lost soldier. A plant like that, it's tending to its title and itself is one thing but then-

Kate Rhodes:

Although meanings shift, don't they? You were telling me about a lady from Ukraine and she had a very different feeling towards this idea.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah. She came to the garden and we were speaking and she was like, "Of all the plants, this is the one that really hits home," because of what's happening in her home at the moment. It was interesting to me that was the plant of all of them that felt the most poignant and relevant even though it was named after this older battle. You just recognise that language goes from being peaceful and civilian to just being deployed out into violence again. There are a lot of plants like that. This idea of... The installation that I've made at Osnabrück is an expansion-

Kate Rhodes:

Can you describe it for us?

Gabriella Hirst:

Yes. I can also show you a drawing of it.

Kate Rhodes:

Excellent.

Gabriella Hirst:

But it is a garden of almost 200 of these species of plants that has been organised into this formal garden installation.

Kate Rhodes:

Wow. That is beautiful.

Gabriella Hirst:

But as I was saying, I think it's interesting that... Because this is the drawing that I did, that it becomes this plan and this map. But yeah, the installation is this structure of almost 200 plants, and where they're planted in proximity to one another also starts to tell a bit of the story. The plants that I gathered that are all referencing World War II battles are planted in proximity to one another, but I steered away from labelling that group "World War II Battles" and instead have labelled all the different beds within the garden with words that cross over between the language of warfare and the language of gardening, so border, tend, divide, pinch, invasive, overgrowth, undergrowth, which was difficult because of course it's being shown in Germany so translating those is its own kettle of fish. But yes, so this is how it manifested in this particular garden, all of these different plants together. But I've forgotten what I was saying, I'm sorry.

Kate Rhodes:

Well, what about... Can you tell us about the project that started in 2014 in the community garden and talk to us about how you've involved the community with their labour, co-opting them in a way to be your co-carers, particularly when you're not there, and their maybe shared interest in the idea of care with this project, particularly when some of the names of those plants might be challenging, offensive, even... Yeah, how you've involved others with this idea of care.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah. I mean, the idea of opening up this project to other people ideally with their consent and to... Because this thing that I was saying beforehand, that I was trying to always make a series of paintings or something from that, and at the crux of it I realised what interests me about this project is the actual performance of caring and tending as a longterm project, that the upkeep of history, it never ends. Margaret Thatcher plant requires endless care over a duration and period of time and her name will mean different things at different times, and that plant will require different needs at different times. Sharing that with other people is the practice, in a way, if given the opportunity to do so and showing it at Osnabrück has been an expansion of that, that the Kunsthalle has been invited to do that and people in the city have been invited to partake in it, there's a lot of workshops. And winter in Europe... so protecting things during the winter and wrapping them up and them dying over a period of time and then saving their seeds and this continual muscular labour. But on the-

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Back to the performance again. It is always a sight to see, often. You have the sculptures being wrapped up and plants going through their cycles of change, a performance in themselves.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, and what sort of story does that tell if all of the Falklands fuchsias die off when it gets too cold and what is the kind of... Or if the labels accidentally get mixed up at a certain time, once they throw their labels off do they carry that history?

Kate Rhodes:

Well, yeah, you were telling me about... Oh, sorry, Gabriella. You were telling me about, actually, in the winter in particular where the apparatus of gardening starts to become perhaps more at the fore where the labels themselves become quite dominant in the garden beds because everything has died away.

Gabriella Hirst:

Absolutely. When I went to Osnabrück to do a site visit the first time, I went to the Botanic Garden, which was where at first the installation was going to be, and turned up there and... I mean, botanical gardening and horticultural gardening I've learned are very different. All the plant names that I have are cultivar names so they're the names that breeders have placed onto those plants, usually for a market. The names suggest a market, they are whatever is marketable at that time. But just this idea of a garden of labels as something really impressive, to go to Botanic Garden and what you see more than anything else is just all of this language. It occurs to me that it's the language that's being gardened as much as the plants itself.

It's about the upkeep of order and about the upkeep of the certain naming structures that have been placed onto those plants that can also so easily slip away. I mean, obviously an expert can tell the difference, but a lot... Now with most of my plants I can recognise them from one another, but I lost a few of the labels for them when I was preparing and moving them around. There are all these auriculas that were named by this guy in his eighties who's made like 600 auriculas. He's in the UK and he named them all after First World War I battles because I'd spoke with him on the phone, he was just like, "Well, I'd been to France at that time and I was interested in war so I named them after that. I'd run out of family members to name them after." But they all arrived with no labels on them and they all looked to me absolutely identical until they flower.

There is this thing about gardening language and gardening a certain archive and a certain way of organising the world, but of course it's wrapped back to Linnaeus and the colonial naming of plants but also just... I guess in my practice in general I'm interested in the upkeep of a certain archive of the power and how mundane that maintenance is. I think you used... or banal that maintenance is... To upkeep things in certain categories, who actually does that and... Of course there's big libraries where that is happening, but who's actually going and cleaning and organising those bits of paper and what human error happens in there?

Kate Rhodes:

And to whose benefit, I suppose, are we keeping this history? Are plants... Will they respond as much to taste, will names change for the same plants, that kind of thing? I think you've got examples of that. I mean, it is interesting, and I know you've got some labels, just how sort of uniform in a way plant labels tend to be with the hierarchy of the left-hand and the right... I think it's top left-hand corner and bottom right-hand corner and a space around the centre of the name. You see that again and again in labels. Yes, this idea sort of everyone being very diligent at following this order of plant names whether there's... Where that comes from.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah, and also how the plant sits against that, like what does it mean when a plant actually throws off its characteristics and...

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah, morphs and changes because of climate issues and influence from other plants.

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah. We worked with a really wonderful graphic designer, Jasper Otto, who found a font that is the font that's... Or a knockoff kind of slightly weird version of the font that is used in botanic labels, and so the aesthetics of order and structure in that is something that we were playing with as well. Yeah, I have Foreign Legion here.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah, right.

Gabriella Hirst:

Friendly Fire as well, which was an iris in this case. Yeah, an iris. What I found interesting in this, which is what I learned because I speak German but my German as well is quite conversational, but learning that, for example, this iris that we call a German Iris or Bearded Iris, its botanic name is Deutsche Schwertlilie, which means 'Sword Lily'. Recognising, I guess, where the language of conflict... Because of the way they come out of the earth.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

These are of things that I've tried to tie into the project because even though the project has this very serious element of upkeep of history, it's also about gossip and how history in the sense of gardening is made. You have these very strict ways of organising things that are like this, but then gardening history, as opposed to perhaps botanic history, is a lot about garden noticeboards and... Well, Kate, you have a lot of experience with growing in community gardens and the sort of conversations that happen there.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah, yeah, and the seeds that just get left in a huge tray saying, "Help yourself." Sometimes you don't know what you're picking up.

Gabriella Hirst:

Exactly.

Kate Rhodes:

But I guess there's a commercialisation wrapped up in this too, these names. They're given flashy, memorable names that are frisson for a commercial market so people will pick them up out of the hundreds of things that you could buy in your seeding tray. Yeah, those names are also shouting out to be noticed for that reason.

Gabriella Hirst:

In one context those names might be so normal and exciting and in other ones they might be so violent and horrendous. Most of the plants that I have are older plants and so they have a bit of time behind them where you can step back and feel some kind of distance of history, which in its own right is exactly what I'm interested in, how far things get from the point of violence that they start to lose their violence and they become softer and civilian and how then they might come back. And also then how they need to be guarded perhaps to stop them from coming back or observed and how you might be involved in that. But, for example, one of the most recent plants I have was made in 2013 and it's called Den Pobedy and it was made in Russia. It is a phlox which is a perennial.

Den Pobedy means Victory Day. It's the 9th of May. It's this day that celebrates the Russian victory over the National Socialist Nazis. It's a day that, I mean, particularly recently was... When I was here in Berlin, there was a lot of fear over what would happen with the invasion of Ukraine, if the day was... Whether that was going to be symbolically a day that there was going to be... something particularly atrocious that day and also with the communities here in Berlin how that might be experienced. It's kind of like, even though it means 'Victory Salute', that World War II act that happened has now, of course, been brought back to fire up populations within this particular time. I'm interested in how that manifests in the horticultural market. This particular phlox was being sold in an Austrian nursery. I've gotten all my plants from various different places, including a lot of commercial nurseries.

On their website they said, the Austrian nursery, that, "It's called Den Pobedy, it's a kind of equivalent to Heil Hitler. We don't think that plants should have political connotations and we don't support this but it's just such a wonderful red. We just really wouldn't do without it." It's just this thing where the mundanity and almost the commercial market and kind of... There's almost a sweetness there but it's grotesque, how that fits against the sort of the name. I don't know. There aren't many red phloxes so I guess that's why they kept it and it's a big seller. There are instances where plants, because their name isn't marketable or because it started seeming too grotesque, they've changed the name. There was an orchard that was made during World War II in USA that was called Cattleya Joseph Stalin. Then some years later as postwar tensions between Russia and USA started picking up, the breeder actually went back to the horticultural society and officially got the name changed to General Patton, who-

Kate Rhodes:

We'll just forget all that other stuff. Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

... one who was acceptable. Yeah, there's... Different histories are told in this weird way, but...

Kate Rhodes:

Well, that's a good segue, maybe, to this incredibly named rose, the Atom Bomb. Let's focus on that for a second now. Tell us about this particular plant, how you're using it in your work. I was also so impressed, and I recommend to anyone listening to check out Gabriella's Rose Garden Conference, this chain of researchers and artists that you brought together as a result of that project too. Yeah. Tell us about How to Make a Bomb.

Gabriella Hirst:

How to Make a Bomb stemmed from this research. I came across this plant in the course of Battlefield that was called the Rosa Floribunda Atom Bomb made in 1953 in Germany by Kordes, which is a big rose breeder. I became fascinated by this plant because it just seemed to really pinpoint and be the most absurd but also just mind-blowing that someone would call a plant atom bomb and put it onto the horticultural market where people were supposed to buy it. I was curious about the market, I was curious about the breeders, but most of all I was curious about what it would be like to actually tend to a plant that has such violent language attached to it. It was really hard to find. It's gone almost completely out of circulation, but I was very lucky and a rose archive in Italy offered to graft me one from the one that they still had in their collection.

Then about two years later I received that plant and from that developed this project, How to Make a Bomb, because, of course, I only had one and I have a dodgy track record of keeping roses alive so I was like, "I might better make more because it's really precious." I started learning how to graft roses so that I could make more of these, and whilst I was doing that, of course, I was living in the UK. I had done a residency in Scotland that was really close to where the entirety of, or 80% of the British nuclear arsenal are kept right near Glasgow. I was thinking about nuclear weaponry while I was there. It's very hard not to. You see submarines going past. I was thinking about the British testing at Maralinga and Montebello Islands and Emu Fields, that as an act of... The nuclear testing...

I mean, in short, I guess acts of nuclear colonialism of detonating nuclear weapons in Australia and failing to clean up and all of the horror that happened in the 1950s with this episode of history and the British colonialism and Australian complicity. Yeah, I was thinking about this and how this happened at the same time as the rose was made and developed this project which was inviting people and teaching people how to graft their own Atom Bomb rose. By this time I was about two generations in breeding with a curator called Warren Harper. Yeah, so we started breeding this rose with people and the site where we located this project is a place called Southend-on-Sea in Essex. It's very close to where the nuclear weaponry that was developed and then tested on unceded lands in Australia where it was assembled before being sent off.

Warren and I, with one generation of Atom Bomb roses that we'd made at that point, I think it was like 25 Atom Bomb roses that we'd made, we made this public sculpture as part of this festival called EstuaryFestival. We planted them in a garden bed that was shaped according to the architectural plans of the weapon test centre, the weaponry... What am I calling it? Where they developed the weapons nearby. We planted these Atom Bomb roses there. We surrounded them by a line of this other plant that was made around the same time that's called the Cliffs of Dover lily that was placed there... Oh, sorry, iris, that was placed there. We had these benches around it that had plaques on it that drew attention to this period in history of British nuclear weapons being tested on Australia and also to the fact that nuclear weapons are not something of the past, that current British government continues to proliferate nuclear weapons. In the meantime, we invited people to come and proliferate their own rose as a means to engaging with that. The local... It was all fine, it was in place for a few weeks and then-

Kate Rhodes:

For all intents and purposes, it looks like almost it could be a domestic garden or a local council garden. It's quite simple. It's got all the elements that we know very well, that we can identify as a garden.

Gabriella Hirst:

In a way, it's incredibly innocuous.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

It has benches to sit there with the roses and discuss this. We made a publication. But a few weeks into it, one of the local councillors took great issue with some of the wording of the signage that we had called Britain a colonial nuclear state. We had said that by continuing to proliferate nuclear weapons and to invest in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the British government has invested in industries of violence and has made a choice to invest in industries of violence as opposed to those of care. Took great issue with the signage, wanted us to take down the signage. They were very happy with us to leave the roses without the label of them being called Rosa Floribunda Atom Bomb, which I think in its own right is really interesting.

Kate Rhodes:

Absolutely.

Gabriella Hirst:

There was this back and forth that happened where basically we were told we needed to take it down in 48 hours or they would take it to the right-wing press and they would take it down themselves. We wanted to keep it up there. The organisation that we were working with basically made the call that they didn't want to have the conversation about nuclear colonialism played out in The Sun and The Mirror and they took it down. Yeah, this is kind of the chaos that happened. Then in response to this and the discussion that came afterwards, we organised this conference, The Rose Garden Conference, which invited various different voices to come and actually discuss this history, this chapter of nuclear violence and how it lingers on, like Dimity Hawkins, Yhonnie Scarce, David Burns, also people who had worked at the site of the nuclear weapons development nearby.

This is how we ended up having to try and keep that conversation going. We also organised the big rose grafting workshop where people from Southend were invited to come and graft their own roses. It's actually only now I keep getting these pictures from people who came and took part in the workshop about how they have Atom Bomb roses growing in their garden and how they're wanting to organise their own workshops to continue just carrying on. This is what happened with the How to Make a Bomb project, and will continue to keep happening because as long as the roses are there and people are engaging with them and talking about them, that's where the project is located.

Kate Rhodes:

Maybe the censorship ironically draws attention to the project in other ways. It disperses the idea that you are interested in exploring, gets rethinking about that history and the involvement from our governments. It's not an issue that's going away, certainly nuclear keeps coming back up in conversations in Australia about new sources of power. Unfortunately it remains relevant.

Gabriella Hirst:

Ever more so, and it's a really hard thing to talk about. I mean, when I came to working with the Atom Bomb rose I didn't know how to talk about nuclear warfare. It was something that I didn't want to talk about. I felt like also it was something that was kind of... This is so naive, but I really thought it was something of the past, grew up being like, well, when... Your generation might have the issues of climate change, however when my parents grew up they were like, "Well, we just had MAD theory or big guns faced at one another, but at least that's not the issue anymore." But of course it still is.

Kate Rhodes:

Totally.

Gabriella Hirst:

Nuclear weapons never go away and they're being... We can just see what's happening right now, and it's always in the background or the foreground. It's really hard to talk about something that is that apocalyptic and catastrophic. I find that actually working with the roses is one way that you can live with it because it's also slightly absurd. Actually, it's very absurd to have an Atom Bomb rose, but nuclear weapons are absurd.

Kate Rhodes:

Clearly nothing benign about it, that there was enough that the garden... There was clearly enough in that to invoke this response that people didn't... They wanted it removed. They're not interested in... Ironically, they're more interested in the collective forgetting, and really how is that possible?

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah. Of course that didn't happen because by it being taken down there became a much larger conversation than there would've been, but something that I always think about is the guy who wanted it to be... I mean, I've actually forgotten his name, which is interesting. He said that... One of the things that he said in his emails was that, "Actually, British government is..." In response to us saying that the actions of... That Britain was supporting an industry of violence as opposed to care by making nuclear weapons. He was saying, "Well, actually, the British government is caring for its people by the proliferation of nuclear weapons."

I think that is really interesting in its own right and that is a really important part of the discussion because that's where... People talk about the gun debate in America at the moment. Where do the lines of care and control and suppression and reuse of a weapon to apply care... What is that and how do we talk about that? He brought that in and it would've been great to have that as part of the discussion. But yeah, particularly now there's all this discourse around care within the arts and this... Of course what we're talking about is care. Where does care become something that entirely shuts down a discourse or keeps people silent?

Kate Rhodes:

Maybe this is a sort of segue to... We've only got time for one more question, but I want to ask you about performance, which is always there in your work. Obviously, you can... Getting in dialogue with those people who wanted to suppress the work, the organisation who were supporting you to put it on in the first place, in a way this constant public performance of your interest in making work in the public realm. Often in your work, we see you literally as a performer but sometimes you're an instructor. We've talked about your incredible work, Force Majeure, that sees you trying, semi-successfully, to paint a storm in a storm. I've heard you speak about how that work came about and this trying to catch a storm on film and the sort of rehearsals in doing that and describing what you were wearing almost like a costume. As I said, you provide these hands-on plant grafting workshops with the How to Make a Bomb project. You've made a performance dressed as a plant and you've recorded a song. You're a really legitimate performer, Gabriella.

Gabriella Hirst:

Thank you. Legitimate, I don't know.

Kate Rhodes:

You're on SoundCloud.

Gabriella Hirst:

That's true, that was cool.

Kate Rhodes:

Your performances aren't always about plants but can you talk about perhaps the relationship between the natural world and performance in your practice? Is the relationship between care and performance, whether it's about comic exchange or just talking or listening and respect for and from audiences when working in this way... Can you talk about that a little bit?

Gabriella Hirst:

I don't know how to answer that. I mean-

Kate Rhodes:

It's a very long-winded question.

Gabriella Hirst:

No, but it's a really good question. I mean, I guess when it comes to performance and the natural world it's like... I'm really interested in these attempts to capture that have occurred and distill and organise that happen within a lot of archive making, whether that be the containment of a storm within the confines of the painted canvas or in Darling Darling, the film that I made last year, or about the attempts to keep the painting within the national collection still visually consistent through conservation efforts. I'm interested in all of these activities as performance projects because there's no end to them.

The upkeep of stasis or an illusion of stasis is a constant procedure and it doesn't stop. It feels so fragile because keeping an archive still or keeping a painting still or keeping a garden still or looking a certain way within what's considered to be within your scheme of things acceptable or not totally out of control and chaotic, those efforts are... You're always about to be overwhelmed. I guess for me art making is that, it's just like you could pick from anything, could make anything. You could make anything and that's overwhelming. You have to pick your confines, and the process of attempting to find those confines is absurd.

Yeah, so I guess that's where I'm coming from with performance and natural world, is my own kind of anxieties about that but also riffing off other attempts to control, whether that be the legal framework of the concept of Force Majeure as a legal clause within my contract, within the making of that work, which is like, if you get out of making this work, in the case of Force Majeure, an act of God that would interfere with you being able to make an artwork. That's the thing, but in terms of it also just being performance... Yeah, I just think it all comes down to performance. If you're making a painting you're performing, you're making decisions of what to still and what to keep in and what to leave out and where those boundaries are. The most exciting part is that. If you can invite people into that, that's great. Maybe they don't want to, but I don't know. I'll be probably thinking about that for a while. What do you think? I don't know.

Kate Rhodes:

Well, thanks for letting us into your world for this short conversation. It'd be lovely to keep on going.

Gabriella Hirst:

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure to try and unpick some of this stuff and stop and talk about it on the way. Conversations change and sometimes it's very serious and sometimes it's very funny and all of the time it's arbitrary, in a way, but yeah.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah, and the garden reminds us of all of those things, doesn't it?

Gabriella Hirst:

Yeah.

Kate Rhodes:

It's a great interlocutor.

Gabriella Hirst:

Sorry?

Kate Rhodes:

The garden is a great interlocutor. It's a teacher, it's a companion, sometimes it's a real pain because it requires constant care. Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

It's a real pain. Yeah, it's something to fight against and with and reflect upon and tend to and have a lovely relationship with at the same time.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Yeah.

Gabriella Hirst:

I'm covered in scratches at the moment. Bites and stings and dirt that will never leave me. I guess I've taken on... I guess I've become my parents.

Kate Rhodes:

There you go. It all comes around.

Gabriella Hirst:

Thank you for all your questions-

Kate Rhodes:

Well, thank you, Gabriella.

Gabriella Hirst:

And the chat. Yeah.

Kate Rhodes:

Yeah. Okay. Thanks again, and thanks on behalf of Monash too.