JAPANESE KNOTWEED
AND THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE
Japanese Knotweed thrives in hostile environments: disturbed, damaged and post-industrial landscapes. Blackburn, once the beating heart of Britain’s cotton industry, is one of the hotspots of this 'invasive' plant. This became the starting point for an investigation into the plant and the landscapes in which it has taken root.
Brought to Britain from Japan in the nineteenth century by German botanist and plant collector Philip Franz von Siebold, Japanese Knotweed arrived as part of a wider culture of botanical collection and exchange shaped by European imperialism.
Today, Japanese Knotweed is largely understood as a scourge: an invasive species associated with damage, contamination and economic loss. Zephie is interested in challenging this narrative. Japanese Knotweed is also an extraordinary plant. It has been used medicinally in Japan for centuries, can survive in environments hostile to many other species, and can regenerate from tiny fragments of rhizome. Almost all of the Japanese Knotweed found in Britain is genetically identical, originating from a single female plant introduced in the nineteenth century. Female clones.
For Zephie, this resilient and unruly plant opens up questions around posthumanism, ecofeminism, feminist speculative fiction and queer ecology. Its ability to reproduce without a male counterpart, its resistance to eradication and its refusal to fit neatly into the categories imposed upon it make it a compelling figure through which to explore relationships between humans, plants and damaged environments.
The project began with an observation: Japanese Knotweed is particularly concentrated in the former industrial heartlands of Britain. Blackburn is one of the areas in the country most affected by the plant, while also experiencing many of the social and economic consequences of rapid deindustrialisation. And this deindustrialisation directly led to the spread of Japanese Knotweed in post-industrial sites.
Zephie is interested in the parallels between the language used to describe Japanese Knotweed as ‘invasive’ and the ways in which similar language has been used to describe human migration. Narratives of invasion and contamination can obscure the structural causes of social and economic decline, redirecting blame towards people and species perceived as outsiders rather than towards the industrial, political and economic systems that have shaped these landscapes.
The project therefore asks what Japanese Knotweed might tell us about the places in which it grows - and what happens when we stop seeing it simply as a problem to be eradicated.
This research has developed through a collaboration with ecologist Dr Dan Jones of Swansea University, whose work focuses on Japanese Knotweed and its ecological impacts. Together, Zephie and Dan are exploring how art, ecology and science might create new ways of talking about damaged landscapes, social justice and access to nature. Their developing socially engaged project in discussions with the National Festival of Making, aims to explore these questions with local communities and create a model that could be replicated in other former industrial areas.
AA2A RESIDENCY
Zephie is currently AA2A Artist in Residence at the University of Lancashire, investigating Japanese Knotweed as a material. Through her AA2A residency she has been developing ceramic glazes made from Japanese Knotweed ash combined with wild clay collected from sites around Blackburn.
The process transforms materials that might otherwise be regarded as waste, nuisance or contamination. Clay from the local landscape carries geological histories stretching deep into the past, while plant ash contains the chemical traces of the environment in which a plant has lived and grown. Even though Japanese Knotweed is genetically identical across different sites, plants growing in different environments can produce different ash and therefore different ceramic results.
The resulting glazes become a form of material storytelling and archiving: combining the deep geological time held within clay with the ecological, colonial and industrial histories embodied in the plant.
Zephie is also experimenting with moulds and ceramic forms based on objects from Blackburn’s industrial heritage, including cotton bobbins and shuttles. Repeated and reproduced forms reference both the repetitive processes of industrial manufacture and the cloning behaviour of Japanese Knotweed. While the objects begin as precise industrial ‘clones’, their surfaces are transformed by unpredictable combinations of local clay and plant ash, disrupting the apparent order and permanence of the original forms.
The long-term ambition is to develop this work into a large-scale, socially engaged installation, working with communities to collectively produce repeated ceramic forms from materials gathered within the landscape.
Ultimately, Japanese Knotweed and the Post-Industrial Landscape asks whether materials that are overlooked, discarded or feared might instead become tools for understanding place.
Through wild clay and Japanese Knotweed, Zephie explores the entangled histories of industry, extraction, colonialism and ecology, while asking whether the damaged landscapes left behind by these systems might also contain the materials and possibilities from which a different, more sustainable future can grow.