2075 Climate Worker Uniform
Mary Kate Cleary
Materials: Silk dyed with fresh leaf artist grown indigo and acid rain, milkweed fluff and seeds, indigo seeds, mugwort seeds, clover seeds recycled wool interfacing, reverse twisted linen thread, cotton underdyed with mugwort, stiffened with artist made soymilk, printed in katazome style with norizome rice paste, then dipped into a fructose reduction indigo vat with artist grown and extracted pigment. Linen dyed in a fructose reduction indigo vat with indigo pigment from India, artist designed workwear pattern, boots artists own, indigo dyed bootlace.
The following is a transcription of an interview with a 2075 climate worker:
“So as it turns out the greatest solution to the kaleidoscopic climate crisis was not something we were waiting to invent, not solar power, bio-remediation, or divesting from fossil fuels and the global war machine. Or rather it wasn’t any one of those things, it was all of them. By removing those obstacles we opened up space for the creative power of working people to blossom. Once we took care of everybody's needs. It freed them up to imagine how to solve the ecological catastrophe we had all inherited.
Most of the solutions are unglamorous. They are slow and frankly sometimes kind of boring. I trained as a welder and machinist, but even before the global ceasefire I refused to make munitions. So instead I spend my time making farm equipment and encouraging farmers to grow carbon sequestering ground cover.
My tractor attachments cut a thin strip in the groundcover and allow farmers to grow vegetables with minimal disturbance to the soil. I started just by working with nitrogen fixing Dutch White Clover, but as time passed I began to play with it, to cross breed it with sweet smelling mugwort and indigo plants.
All of that takes less than ten hours a week. I spend some of the remaining time examining the eco tones around the fields. These barrier zones are filled with disruptive plant species that can crowd out more beneficial ones.The seeds of some of these plants, particularly bittersweet vine, are incredibly difficult to dispose of. That plant has a long rich history of being turned into protective clothing and objects by the Ainu Peoples of Japan, but it is displaced and far from home, it is prone to taking over fragile barrier zones and turning them into a monoculture. I tried working with goats and controlled burns but what with the bio accumulation and drought and wildfires and I had to change tactics. So I sewed up these protective overalls and heavily dyed them with my mugwort/ clover/ indigo hybrid to protect me from the small flying insects and the bad dreams that haunt these waste spaces. The images on the ribbons that wrap around my ankles are representations of the hybrid plants that I work with. They are done in the style of the Deerfield Blue and White Needlework Society. Those folks were fantasizing about new combinations of plants and embroidering them over 100 years ago in this very valley.
I made knee patches quilted with a thin layer of silk and milkweed mugwort and indigo seeds, so as I remove disruptive bittersweet vines my pants become torn and I spread the seeds of more beneficial plants.
I gather up the seeds of disruptive bittersweet vines and prevent them from sprouting, I pour molten metal on them. I then turn the molten metal lumps into talismans I can keep on my body- to help me remember the weight of the task I am undertaking.”
“Her mother had remembered the names of the plants by what they did, boot black, fever, toothache. The cures for problems they had faced in colonialism grew wild and pointless to anyone but the displaced. What could bloom here, and what would they call it? Is there a plant that can hold the total loss? Scream tree? Waling grass? Moaning root? She had to ask that question to deny the reason for it. What does a healer do after the last plant has abandoned? She pushed her fingers into the dust for now.”
-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World
“She had cast herself into the gyres of transformation, the key to which was not redistribution of wealth and the abolition of work but the reverse: the redistribution of work and the abolition of wealth. Pollution related diseases proliferated from all directions, from mining, industrial chemicals, commercial agriculture, nonferrous metal production, electronic waste recycling, air pollution, foul water, the poisons of domination and exclusion, and the abandonment of the precautionary principle in favor of maximizing exploitation. To work together was to contend with waste, not leaving it to someone somewhere else to die of, but claiming it, in equality. To be was to be beholden to this toxically industrious inheritance. Once the categories"worker " and "boss " were dismantled, labor disalienated, companies cooperativeized, people began to practice repair in their own communities themselves, drawing on traditional and emergent techniques, integrating local and technical knowledge. It was fun and difficult to heal the land, to learn how.”
-Crocosmia, Miranda Mellis
“Realizing what I had done I confessed that while I was also a god, I had an evil mind. Fearing that I would die in terrible pain I asked the old man to turn me into bittersweet so that instead, I might be useful.”
An excerpt from an Aniu story on the creation and usefulness of bittersweet vines.
Fukuoka 1995
-Ainu Ethnobiology, Dai Williams
Further reading
Deerfield Embroidery: Traditional Patterns form Colonial Massachusetts, Margery Burnam Howe
Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America, Eileen Boris
The Relations of Art to Labour, William Morris
Red White and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life, Andrea Feeser
Ireland’s Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore, Niall Mac Coitir
A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining The Future Shapes The Present, Glenn Adamson
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Tsing
Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin
M Archive: After the End of the World, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Crocosmia, Miranda Mellis
Strip Tilling: https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/resources/strip-tillage/
Mary Kate Cleary
32, Greenfield, MA
Mary Kate Cleary is a femme multimedia artist and metalworker concentrating on both the architectural and body scale. Her work explores the revolutionary opportunity of tools and material culture to shape our lived experience and the land around us.
Her background in agricultural engineering in the Connecticut River Valley heavily influences her artistic practice. She applies post scarcity logic to contemporary land stewardship problems.
Her work began as purely functional, to be put directly into use by her friends and neighbors in their farm fields, but as climate chaos continued to escalate her work became increasingly speculative. She now imagines material culture from a playful view of the near future. Her work is meant to be used and lived with, to inspire a gentle and thoughtful way of moving through the world; it moves between dye garden and kitchen and would not be possible without community collaboration.
She imagines the hybrid pasture plants of the near future, a combination of carbon sequestering clover, the potent dye plant indigo and the protective aromatic mugwort. She renders these fantasy plants in the fantastical style of the Deerfield Blue and White Needlework Society, but using a home made rice resist and traditional katazome screenprinting techniques. Using home grown and fermented indigo. She prints images of these fantasy plants onto workwear she designs and sews herself. She imagines the workwear that will dignify and encourage the citizens of the near future to become proud land stewards- to elevate the work of tending to the land they live on and the act of removing disruptive plants from toil to vocation. She wears that clothing today to feel what the future will feel like, to physically embody the world we are trying to build.