Elastic Continuum

Rubber is one of the most ubiquitous materials in our daily lives, yet we rarely stop to consider its origins. If we do, we might picture it as something impersonal—an industrial product tapped from distant trees or churned out by synthesic chemistry. Elastic Continuum tells a different story. At its center is Taraxacum koksaghyz, a little-known dandelion subspecies hailed as a strategic resource and rubber alternative. By assembling the improbable biography of this resilient plant, artist Bethan Hughes has unearthed a complex history of empires, experiments, and entanglements. 

The book unfolds along two braided paths: one follows the dandelion’s east-to-west trajectory through sites of political ambition and wartime scarcity—tracing its role in Soviet laboratories and Nazi-occupied Poland to Cold War-era research in the US and recent EU sustainability projects. The other traces Hughes’s own west-to-east journey as she encounters the plant in living form and archival documents—across breeding facilities, mountain valleys, scientific laboratories, herbaria, and vernacular networks of memory. Together, these threads form a lyrical, deeply researched account of vegetal persistence, human intervention, and the quiet power of overlooked species.

Evocatively designed and published as part of K. Verlag’s Processing Process series, Elastic Continuum expands upon Bethan Hughes’s multi-part audiovisual installation Hevea. Blending fragments of the artist’s own writing with archival finds, visual documentation, and an in-depth editorial conversation, the book becomes both companion and extension of the installation. At its heart are the intertwined biographies of the Kazakh dandelion and the many women—scientists, workers, caretakers—whose lives became interwoven with its story through shifting regimes and geopolitical upheaval. What emerges is a poignant counter-narrative to the objectifying, extractive gaze: a layered, intimate exploration of how we might learn to see and relate to both the industrial and the natural world—otherwise, and in conjunction.

Bethan Hughes’s audiovisual installations, sculptures, and texts explore the unnatural ecologies generated through industry, commerce, and technology. Her work has been exhibited at venues including LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (ES); gnration, Braga (PT); Kunstpavillion, Innsbruck (AT); nGbK, Berlin; Ars Electronica, Linz (AT); haubrok foundation, and HAUNT/frontviews, both Berlin.

In parallel with this release, we’re pleased so share the artist's limited-edition silkscreen print Dandelion Fever, launched in 2024 as part of a joint fundraising campaign to support the production of the book. Please don't hesitate to order one or both of these items and we'll be glad to ship them to you straight-away.