Textiles as Ecological Memory: Preserving Brazil’s Plant Wisdom in Contemporary Art

BOTANICAL LETTERS – Issue No. 1
Written by Cleidi Hearn

Every Plant Holds a Memory

Not only of its own life — the water it has drawn, the light it has absorbed — but of the hands, languages, and cosmologies that have named, cultivated, and protected it. These layered memories are fragile. They are lost when landscapes are cleared, seeds patented, or the knowledge of elders dismissed as mere folklore.

In my work as a contemporary textile artist, I use fabric as a vessel for these memories. Thread, pigment, and surface are not simply materials; they are carriers of ecological histories. By painting the native flora of Brazil, I aim to preserve not only botanical forms, but the ancestral and cultural wisdom interwoven with them. This is what I call textiles as ecological memory — art that remembers what the land itself knows.

The Role of Art in Remembering

Science measures, predicts, and warns — and in the age of climate crisis, it is often the dominant voice. Yet, art offers another mode of preservation: one that reawakens emotional, spiritual, and cultural bonds with the living world. This is not ornamentation. It is cultural work, where aesthetic form becomes an archive for ecological knowledge.

Brazil’s biomes — from the dense greens of the Amazon to the wind-swept Pampas — each hold a distinct botanical vocabulary. While science documents these species, communities have sung them into being, invoked them in ceremony, and woven them into cloth for centuries. Art can carry these layered legacies forward in ways that remain accessible, intimate, and alive.

Linen: A Fabric with Its Own Memory

My choice of linen is deliberate. Woven from flax, linen is among humanity’s oldest textile relationships with the plant kingdom. Long before cotton dominated global trade, linen clothed pharaohs, enshrouded sacred relics, and moved along ancient trade routes as both currency and cultural exchange.

Archaeological fragments prove its resilience — linen can endure for millennia when cared for, quietly holding the stories of those who worked it. To paint on linen is to join a lineage of makers who understood that cloth could outlast its maker. In ancient Egypt, it served in funerary rites; in medieval Europe, it bore liturgical embroidery; in rural Brazil, it preserved the hand-stitched marks of women absent from written history.

Its ecological life cycle mirrors the principles in my work. Flax demands far less water and fewer chemicals than cotton, and when rotated with food crops, enriches rather than depletes the soil. Linen carries its own botanical origin within its weave, making it both subject and surface — a living witness that now bears the painted forms of other plants.

Brazil’s Plant Wisdom: Beyond Specimen Records

To speak of Brazil’s plant wisdom is to acknowledge the many communities that hold it. Indigenous nations, Afro-Brazilian traditions, rural farmers, and urban gardeners have each shaped plant knowledge through language, ritual, medicine, and craft. A single species may be food, cure, dye, or sacred emblem depending on who names it.

Referencing these plants in contemporary art is never a neutral act. It situates them as cultural agents — carriers of stories and provocateurs of dialogue — and resists the colonial gaze that has long treated them as extractable commodities rather than living participants in shared history.

Ecological Memory as Resistance

To embed ecological memory in textiles is to counter erasure. It pushes against the forces that strip plants of their cultural and ecological relationships. In Brazil — where agricultural expansion continually threatens native ecosystems — remembering the plants of each biome becomes an act of quiet resistance.

In the hands of the artist, a flower is never just an image. It becomes a site of negotiation between past and present, scientific taxonomy and oral tradition, the urgency of the global art market and the patient wisdom of the land.

A Call to See, to Listen, to Remember

Textiles as ecological memory invite the viewer to see beyond pigment and weave — to witness lineage, to hear the whispered stories beneath the surface, to recognise that art can be as alive and enduring as a seed.

As Botanical Letters unfolds in the months ahead, I will share more of the plants, places, and people who shape my work. My hope is that each letter serves as an invitation: not simply to look, but to remember.