Fairchild’s innovative scientific practices left him vulnerable to backlash from religious authorities. As a posthumous defense against his era's bigots, Fairchild established an endowment for an annual "Vegetable Sermon" to be preached each year in Shoreditch Parish Church, England.
In 2015, the lecture ‘On Flowers' by ecologist & writer Dr. Rupert Sheldrake revived this revered ritual event.
Renowned for his investigations into the biology of human unconscious processes, Sheldrake also asks provocative questions that challenge belief systems; Are the laws of nature merely habits? Can the laws of nature be transformed by art?
Sheldrake defines New Biology’s discovery of morphogenetic fields and morphonic resonances, as the “basis of memory in nature... the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species”.
My project investigates how artists can draw upon and contribute to this collective memory. And how through morphonic resonances, new patterns of behavior can spread through the world more rapidly through art, expanding a vision of utopian, evolutionary biology and morphogenesis, anticipating organic powers as eminently awaiting forces, while rebuking empty aestheticism.
I describe these non-figuration pieces as "biology as self-portraiture", where the artist, present as the only inhabitant in the drawing, recodifies personal identity–interrogated, erased, even hybridized and reformed, just as Thomas Fairchild scientifically designed his plants to cleanse London’s toxic air.