an outdoor installation by Iman Person reclaiming and reinterpreting West Indian cosmology, centering the 'Bush'—the dense, forested landscapes that have long served as both medicine and spiritual anchor in Jamaican tradition.

A Voyage to the Islands (1707-1725) by Sir Hans Sloane claimed to document the natural world of the Caribbean, yet it ignored the knowledge of enslaved Africans, Indigenous peoples, and women—the very stewards of the land. Wild Seed restores what was left out. It brings forward the voices of herbalists and bushmen, inviting them to speak before the Atlanta community, weaving their narratives into the land once more. Each visit to the installation is an act of remembrance. It is a conversation between the past and the present, an offering to the traditions that know plants are not only remedies but storytellers, bearing witness to the lives and lineages that shaped them. The work asks us to listen—to the land, to the histories carried in root and leaf, and to the knowledge that refuses to be forgotten.

The installation features herbal tonics prepared with plants sourced from Jamaican herbalists, housed in etched glass jars that preserve fragments of oral histories. A central ceramic vessel, shaped by significant bush medicine plants, bears their imprints, embodying the land’s memory. Large fabric tapestries, imprinted with images of the Jamaican bush, create an immersive environment, while field recordings of wind, water, and insects evoke Kamau Brathwaite’s “alter/native language.” As industrial expansion threatens both landscape and knowledge, Wild Seed resists erasure, transforming plant wisdom into an archive that breathes, steeps, and speaks.

Iman Person is a first-generation Jamaican-American artist and cultural anthropologist whose research explores the intersections of Black and Indigenous technologies, and their connections to ritual, the land, language, and cosmic time.

Her work goes beyond traditional Western views of technology to offer a somatic examination of cultural diasporas within the Americas and the Caribbean. In her practice, she sees the body as deeply connected to the elements, with her recent works focusing on air and ether as points of convergence for exploring collective histories, migration, and diasporic memory.

Using Africana cosmologies and personal experience, Iman channels speculative visions of Black futurity through intuitive writing, video, real-time data, experimental sound, sensory ethnography, and object-making to shape unexplored ideas concerning living archives and sovereignty while navigating the delicate terrain occurring at the edges of multiple worlds.

Join us at Wild Seed

April 19, 2025
5PM - 8PM ET

The Goat Farm (Village Green)
1200 Foster St NW
Atlanta, GA 30318