Dream Fern: The Secret Admirer, 2025
Installation view, CCA Derry Londonderry.
Photographs by CCA Derry Londonderry and Paola Bernardelli.
Material: Mussel-, scallop- and limpet-based bioplastic.
Dream Fern: The Secret Admirer is an installation that reworks the 1990s board game Dream Phone, shifting its logic of flirtation and deduction into a Xenothorpian multi-species register. In this version, the hunky heart-throbs are not human suitors but plants, insects, and bacterial life forms that inhabit the artist’s garden. Desire is no longer projected onto an idealised body, but dispersed across ecological relationships, growth patterns, and modes of survival.
The board is fabricated from Japanese knotweed, an invasive species often framed as undesirable or excessive, echoing how certain bodies and desires are marginalised or controlled. At the centre, replacing the plastic phone, is a pile of stones taken from a garden wall at the sea’s edge, collapsed during a recent storm. Residing on these rocks are fern forms made from seashell and plant-based bio-materials. Ferns, among the first plants to colonise bare rock, are bisexual and self-propagating, offering an alternative model of intimacy rooted in resilience, adaptability, and persistence rather than choice, conquest, or winning.
Text written by Maeve O’Lynn.
Installation view, CCA Derry Londonderry.
Photographs by CCA Derry Londonderry and Paola Bernardelli.
Material: Mussel-, scallop- and limpet-based bioplastic.
Dream Fern: The Secret Admirer is an installation that reworks the 1990s board game Dream Phone, shifting its logic of flirtation and deduction into a Xenothorpian multi-species register. In this version, the hunky heart-throbs are not human suitors but plants, insects, and bacterial life forms that inhabit the artist’s garden. Desire is no longer projected onto an idealised body, but dispersed across ecological relationships, growth patterns, and modes of survival.
The board is fabricated from Japanese knotweed, an invasive species often framed as undesirable or excessive, echoing how certain bodies and desires are marginalised or controlled. At the centre, replacing the plastic phone, is a pile of stones taken from a garden wall at the sea’s edge, collapsed during a recent storm. Residing on these rocks are fern forms made from seashell and plant-based bio-materials. Ferns, among the first plants to colonise bare rock, are bisexual and self-propagating, offering an alternative model of intimacy rooted in resilience, adaptability, and persistence rather than choice, conquest, or winning.
Text written by Maeve O’Lynn.
