Vivarium: Plant, Tea & Perfume Workshop
Experimental Open Studio
Glassel Gallery
Baton Rouge
June 20
You’ve heard of doing your 23 and Me or heritage trip back to your ancestors’ homeland. But have you heard of finding your ancestry through plants?
As part of Glassel Gallery’s experimental open studio, Rachel Parish held two workshops that allowed participants to reconnect with their “plantcestry” through native plants and tea/perfume. The workshops evolved from a personal project by Parish. She did research on her own ancestry and worked to grow all the plants associated with the various places her ancestors lived. After nurturing the plants through their natural life cycle, the project sparked performance art, writing, and this workshop.
You can’t grow plants in two hours, she explained to the class. Bt what we could take a little bit of the plants or their tinctures and mix them together.
At the two Vivarium workshops, participants were directed to look at a map of the globe split into 52 different zones. After identifying the zones, participants were given the opportunity to sniff the different plants associated with their zones and design a perfume or tea with their choice blend of those plants.
After that, she said, “We’ll mix you up and see how you smell or taste.”
As a premise, it’s interesting. In practice, it’s meaningful. With the prevalence of importing and exporting goods, most people would likely be hard pressed to name the plants native to the area they grew up in, much less the ones their ancestors may have interacted with. And it’s not a science. Some of the zones contain multiple countries with completely different cultures. The tinctures are extracted added in essentially equal parts rather than in different ratios like they might in an actual perfume or tea. There’s no method to find out your ancestry if you don’t already know it.
When does anyone get to try a product that is equal parts every place they feel connected to? The places one chooses doesn’t have to be the literal ones in one’s heritage or even places they’ve been. No one is policing you or what is “connected enough” to include it. There’s radical acceptance there that some may find healing and others can probably appreciate for its specificity.
My partner, whose parents are from Taiwan and has lived in California and Minnesota, started picking his ingredients: cinnamon, star anise, orange peel.
“Are you making tea or marinating meat?” I asked him.
Why not both? came the response.
Each product created in the workshop was unique, some very serious and others, like my partner’s raised pork spice packet tea, kinda silly.
The workshop asked people to leave their creations behind for a reception where all the experimental open studio creation would be on display. Afterward, they could go home with their respective makers.
Vivarium does exactly what every good workshop should: equips people with resources and sparks curiosity to inspire people to create different things. My partner is planning to actually make some braised pork belly with the ingredients. He’s never thought to put magnolia in his meat marinade. But who knows? Maybe the ginger-y tasting notes will be good.
In case anyone was wondering, the places that made me smell like a citrus-y tea cake. I think I’m going to reverse-engineer one out of the ingredients I used, too.
