Elastic Continuum – Publication and Fundraising Edition

This forthcoming book is currently available for pre-order and we will fulfill your shipping in February 2025. The A3 poster edition, however, is launched as part of a joint fundraising campaign to support the production of the book and these prints will be shipped immediately. Please don't hesitate to get order any or both items now.

Elastic Continuum explores the flexible connections between people, plants, politics, and power through the material and symbolic transformations of Taraxacum koksaghyz—a rubber-producing plant commonly known as the Kazakh or Russian dandelion. The narrative of this new volume of K. Verlag‘s Processing Process series unfolds in two intertwined trajectories: one follows the plant’s historical journey from East to West, tracing its role within the political and economic imperialisms of the Soviet Union, Nazi-occupied Poland, wartime United States, and the European Union. The other retraces the artist Bethan Hughes's own path, moving from West to East, as she encounters the plant and the people entwined in its story across breeding facilities, research laboratories, herbaria, mountain valleys, and national archives.

Expanded through fragments of text, images, and documentation from the accompanying audio-visual installation, the book delves into the entangled biographies of the flower and a woman whose lives became deeply interwoven. In doing so, Hughes offers a poignant counter-narrative to the objectifying, extractive gaze, illuminating alternative ways of seeing and relating to the natural world.

Limited-Edition Silkscreen Print: A Fundraising Campaign

Dandelion Fever, Bethan Hughes, 2024
Silkscreen print and chalk on paper, 300gr Bristol card, 30 x 42cm (A3), edition of 30

1942. The US Emergency Rubber Project is in full swing. Touted as a potential solution to America’s dependency on imported rubber, the Rubber Dandelion fever grips the nation. Speculating that the common garden-variety dandelion could skyrocket in value, Henry Ford instructs a worker to use a portable vacuum cleaner to collect seeds.

In this image from the Ford Archives, a steel nozzle creeps toward a cluster of delicate seed balls, moments before the seeds are sucked into oblivion—a stark, unadorned snapshot of extraction. The artist reproduces this archival image as a silkscreen print in chrome green and acid yellow, amplifying its industrial undertones and ecological resonance.

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.