Adele Kenworthy
My name is Adele Kenworthy (she/they) and I create botanical interventions in public spaces.
In my art practice, I explore how flowers have dyed, draped and nourished social movements and daily reimagine what it means for socially engaged art to exist as an embodied practice of care.
Most of my floral sculptures are portraits of a person or a community or the result of people gathering and creating a sculpture together. When I’m not engaging in community facing work, in my studio I arrange flowers known in Japan as ikebana, but known in Korea as cocoji.
One thing I learned during my research -- amidst the height of quarantine and grief – is that this form of floral arranging is widely attributed to Japan, but contended as an appropriated practice that was erased from Korea’s history and narrative during the time of occupation and war.
Korea’s origins of flower arranging that influenced Japan’s ikebana is rooted in the practice of Kongyang-Hwa, which is offering flowers to Buddha.
The tradition art of arranging flowers in Korea called cocoji, 꽃꽂이, is this idea that arranging is as much about a way of living — connecting with nature and your environment — as it is about creating something beautiful.
My mother-in-law once said she saw her mother’s generation arrange flowers as part of their daily life that she watched disappear as she grew older.
Every time my hands are in flowers, I think of my mom and how they were the only way she knew how to communicate love and light when I was three and we lived hiding in a domestic violence shelter. I think of my grandmother who was in an arranged marriage to reduce her chance of being forced to become a comfort woman. I think of my son and the two I lost. I think of what care means in my life and art practice and the people I am calling to join me in this space.
Lisa Lowe who wrote Immigrant Acts, really summarized in a perfect way an integral part of the Asian American experience, in that “the making of Asian American culture may be a much “messier” process than unmediated vertical transmission from one generation to another, including practices that are partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly invented.”
And taking all the shared lived experiences, contradictions, and multiplicities, I am exploring self and community care as an embodied journey towards collective liberation.
Questions that run deep in my practice and I hope to bring in this residency are:
- who is allowed to be a community?
- why is joy and beauty subversive for some but a commodity for others?
- how can we empower bipoc communities to hold contradictions in public spaces? to hold both joy and justice in the same breath?
My deepest desire is for the space I hold in these arrangements to bear witness to the remnants and artifacts of our shared humanity, and to flood all the silences between generations with those memories.
And just I wanted to share one line by poet Alok V. Menon that really speaks to me right now:
“your wound is my garden. i have found life here in the places you have left for dead. let’s bloom together.”