SEEDS INSERVICE

Seeds InService: A Papermaking Institute (website) is an ecofeminist art project by Melissa Potter and Maggie Puckett that combines feminist and ecological concerns.

Each year, Seeds InService plants thematic gardens to grow fiber for hand papermaking, propagate endangered seeds, and explore feminist histories.

Papermaking plants grow in gardens curated each year around themes including Women’s Health, Las Mujeres Zapatistas, Pre-Colonial Gardens, Bosnian Women’s Magic, and War Gardens: Seeds of Displacement.

Fibers grown from these plants become raw material for art works, collaborations, research and workshops.

“The duo held harvesting and papermaking workshops and created an ad-hoc distribution center for radical feminist literature, extending the garden’s metaphor to mean the seeding or cultivation of future generations of activist artists and gardeners.”

— Jenni Sorkin, critic and curator

Seeds InService’s book, An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank, being deposited in the Global Seed Vault mountain art collection, Svalbard, Norway.

Seeds InService’s deposit in the Global Seed Vault mountain art collection, Svalbard, Norway.

Papermaking and medicinal plants growing

Process from seed to sheet

Velvet Queen Sunflower, seed packet, sunflower handmade paper, letterpress, sunflower seeds. Narrating the story of 488 State street, a brothel at the end of the 19th Century adjacent to the location of the Papermaker’s Garden.

Food, Sex, & Death, a performance in the Papermaker’s Garden exploring the exploitation of women in contemporary agriculture and the 19th Century brothels in the location of the garden.

Bosnian Magic Garden Tea Event

Women’s March with Banner Books, 2017

Kombucha paper experiments