The Next Epoch Seed Library’s Lawn Lab: A Public Experiment in Collaboration with Seeds, Time, and Weeds

Abstract

This article and the accompanying media essay describe my experience developing and implementing the collaborative, interdisciplinary art project The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory (Lawn Lab). Combining urban ecology, socially engaged art, and multispecies pedagogy, Lawn Lab takes what I define as a critical, ecosocial approach to environmental art. As a public, socially engaged project, it provides a framework for establishing rewilding interventions in institutional and residential lawns from seeds lying dormant in the soil. Focusing on Lawn Lab’s inaugural season, I describe how the project grew out of the Next Epoch Seed Library (NESL), an artist-run organization I cofounded in 2014 to collect, store, and share the seeds of spontaneous urban plants (a.k.a. weeds). After contextualizing NESL and Lawn Lab as part of a larger community of practitioners who work with vegetal attunement and entanglement in urban and disturbed landscapes, I describe the project’s implementation and progress over its first season. I close by connecting my experience implementing the first season of Lawn Lab to Georgina Born and Andrew Barry’s concept of the public experiment, part of their framework for analyzing how knowledge is produced through public-facing, interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art and science. I use this framework to explore how Lawn Lab provides a forum for imagining and enacting new possibilities around landscape maintenance and care, urban biodiversity, and public health, offering collaboration with weedy plants as one means of working toward ecological justice in the face of a protracted environmental crisis.