Sunflower Seeds

OSC seeds, 2018

Paper, seeds, ink

25 x 15 cm

Purchased from DeGroot’s, 2018

Personal collection

Sunflower seeds are native to North America, planted for their edible seeds and for their aesthetic effects. Sunflower seeds have a dark, small and hard exterior that grow to be colourful and very tall, durable and not affected by heat and drought. The pattern of the seeds follows a specific sequence of numbers of spirals in a consistent manner, called the Fibonacci sequence. Sunflowers grow following the direction of the sun. Planting and taking care of plants can become very therapeutic during times of stress because it allows you to focus on something else. It also becomes a visual of the process of growth and how long it takes to become something new. This can be a good representation of life and how we all need time to become what we set out to be.

During my childhood I found a reoccurring theme - sunflowers were correlated to happiness, connected to images of my mother watering the giant sunflowers in my backyard on a summer day and my friends and I going to sunflower fields to take pictures, for example. After my hometown had multiple suicides in one-year, people would often be found making posts including yellow hearts and sunflowers to keep hope in the community.

Connected to this personal history, my hope for these sunflowers is to grow and draw attention to the movement advancing care of environmental spaces and awareness of the vital interdependence of humans and plants. As we see the environment rebound with such strength during the pandemic while detrimental human impacts are reduced, these seeds now symbolize for me hopeful potential.

Abby Greene