Recording the Medicinal Plants of Siwai, Bougainville stems from an invitation to create photographic light recordings of traditional medicinal plants within dense rainforests in the Siwai region of Bougainville Island, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea.
Concerned with the erosion of tacit traditional medicinal knowledge, Chief Alex Dawia of the Taa Lupumoiku Clan approached Kate to use photography to chronicle Siwai plant knowledge for preservation. Although not from his culture, community or region, Chief Dawia felt that they were connected in mutual interests of self-transcendence—a connection he had made when viewing the series Dust Landscapes in Melbourne.
Chief Jeffrey Noro of the Rura Clan, also from Siwai, joined their efforts, motivated by similar concerns to preserve tacit knowledge systems. Chief Noro also lived through Bougainville’s civil war (locally known as the Crisis) from 1989 to 1997 and had desired to provide positive community outcomes after such a traumatic period in Bougainville’s history.
The lumen printing process, which uses expired colour or black and white light-sensitive photographic paper, was chosen because it could be undertaken onsite in Siwai and offered direct community engagement with the photographic process. As an action exhibiting ecological awareness, the expired photographic paper is also upcycled and offered another life.
Community members gathered plant materials and brought them to the makeshift studio space, which also housed local meetings. Over a few hours, the sunlight and humidity slowly orchestrated an imprint onto the substrate by activating and enmeshing the chemicals in the photosensitive paper with those of the plant matter. In the nearby rainforest, used plant material was discarded to decompose and regenerate the forest. In their latent state, the resulting lumen prints were packed away in a light-tight black bag for transportation to Melbourne.
Back in the studio in Melbourne, the lumen prints were translated into digital data through the scanography process. While the analogue lumen print remained vulnerable to light, leading to an opaque demise each time exposed to the flatbed scanner’s light, the digital process immortalised the image through its capturing method that occurred over time and space under the scanner's glass pane. Movement of the lumen print while scanning created glitching, as well as unconventional and broken image edges that referenced distortions in tacit knowledge dissemination from one generation to the next.
Conventional presentation of photographic prints on the white walls of the gallery was rejected in favour of tabletop presentation (under INSTALL DOCUMENTATION on this website) to mirror the way community members engaged with the production of the lumen prints at Kainake Village.
Latin scientific plant names for the artwork titles were rejected in favour of local Motuna language plant names. This was particularly important, given that traditional language and the environment are inextricably enmeshed in Siwai: ‘When you lose the traditional name, you lose the knowledge of the plant because the traditional name of the plant describes the functionality of the plant’ (The Kainake Project 2018). The final images are at a 1:1 ratio of the original plant material.