Aug 6, 2025 - Aug 16, 2025

Flora of the Everyday

Çeyiz Makal Fairclough

In A Ritual of Noticing: Flora of the Everyday, Çeyiz Makal Fairclough invites viewers to participate in a quiet yet radical act of attention. This act asks us to slow down, look closer, and reconsider our relationship with the plant life that surrounds us.

Grounded in psychogeographic practice and the Situationist tradition—particularly the concept of the dérive (or drift) as conceived by Guy Debord—her process begins with walking. Rather than viewing it as passive transit, she considers walking a form of embodied inquiry. Through these daily drifts, often within the borders of familiar neighborhoods, she attunes herself to the subtle presence of plants growing in the margins, cracks, and edges—wild and cultivated flora that typically go unnoticed. Each walk becomes a ritual of receptivity, a way of listening to the murmurs of a place through its smallest botanical expressions. An important aspect of the artist’s practice involves noticing, collecting, and bringing plants encountered during walks into the studio. These fleeting encounters evolve into a sustained relationship through processes of observation, photography, and archiving carried out at home. The continuous engagement with the forms, textures, and seasonal transformations of plants forms the conceptual and visual foundation of the artist’s production process.

Rather than treating plants as mere environmental décor or ornamental background—a symptom of what scientists and philosophers term "plant blindness" (Wandersee & Schussler, 1998)—the human tendency to overlook flora as passive and peripheral, Fairclough foregrounds their agency, quiet resilience, and capacity to shape and be shaped by the ecologies they inhabit. These floral close-ups are poetic portraits, not scientific documents: visual meditations on time, memory, and the shared materiality of life.

By engaging with vegetal matters, her work contributes to a growing ecological awareness that repositions plants as co-inhabitants—entities with their own rhythms, histories, and ways of being in the world—rather than passive life forms. In doing so, she asks: What does it mean to share space with beings we rarely see yet depend on for survival? What stories emerge when we choose to notice what we’ve been taught to overlook?

Through her camera, the everyday becomes visible. Even the smallest flower becomes a site of entanglement between the self and the landscape, visibility and neglect, and fragility.