Poisonous, Noxius and Suspicious focuses on plants that were forbidden, stigmatized and banned by the colonial "civilizing" process, due to their use in sacred rituals, hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac powers and ancestral healing practices. I draw them with artificial intelligence, taking as a reference botanical illustrations of women who have been erased from the history of art and science, creating speculative biographies that cross-reference the stories of these botanists with those of the "suspect" plants.
I borrowed the project's title from a 19th century teaching manual(Anne Pratt, 1857) on plants that "have proved fatally poisonous to man".
Giselle Beiguelman, 2024
