The Seedbed Project  (Information is easy, ideas are hard)

In the spring of 1995 I asked three hundred people to play a game with me, to become metaphorical transfer points for an important idea.

I didn't tell them they were metaphors, however. I merely sent each a seedhead full of marigold seeds, and asked that the seeds be planted, nurtured and sent on to become part of a larger piece, a new idea. I was thinking of the way ideas can be transferred from one person to ten and from ten to one hundred. The process was a wonderful metaphor for the transfer of ideas in a culture; it's just that I forgot (or never understood) that good ideas do not move geometrically through the culture. Some ideas and seeds are simply not viable to begin with. Of those that are, some will go astray before they reach their intended destination. More often, the intended recipient simply isn't interested in the idea and it is ignored, or the intended receives the seed of an idea and cannot manage to plant the idea in him/herself well enough to allow it to grow and flower. Even when all of those steps have been successful, there is the wayward accident that knocks the flat of surviving plants off the fourth floor windowsill. Finally, all other things having been successful and the seed brought to flower, the last step (which could  become the first step) does not succeed and the flower does not live to make the transfer.

Of the three hundred seedheads I sent, only one person actually managed to bring the plants to fruition and mail them to me at Penland School. Those thirty plants would not have created the critical mass necessary to complete the piece– the larger idea, then, would have failed.

Being committed to the idea, however, I planted one thousand seeds myself in my own backyard. Five hundred of those plants survived and were taken to Penland to become part of the larger piece, which you see here. These five hundred plants will each produce several hundred seedheads containing several thousand marigold seeds. With luck and cooperative winters, the piece will become a true seedbed–re-seeding itself each year, offering tender plants to passersby–until one day it is dismantled to make room for another idea.

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The Seedbed Project, Penland School, Penland, NC

November 1995 – November 1996  120” x 180” x 140”

Baled grasses, bamboo, manure, clay, topsoil, sisal, and marigolds