“Hunting Wild Grasses” is an olfactory-photographic work. We think we know grass, but we do not. 

“Hunting Wild Grasses” pays attention to apples and grass, plants that to Londoners are local and familiar. If we take the time to look harder at common knowledge and what is under our noses we can see the long history of cross pollination and global movement that creates the idea of what is local.

The smell element of “Hunting Wild Grasses” comes from green apples – a fruit believed to heighten cognitive intelligence. The proverb ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ is more than just a saying: scientists have discovered that the antioxidant named quercetin found in the skin of apples can improve memory. Smell is a sense that stimulates memory: it immediately reaches the limbic system, the part of the brain that deals with emotion, memory and feelings.

The visual element is a slide-projection of wild grasses photographed in London and Kingston, Jamaica. Despite their ubiquity, these grasses are overlooked and, in many cases, are yet to be classified and given names. Using one-hundred rolls of infrared 35mm slide film, Maciá documented these grasses in a way that is beyond the capacity of the naked human eye. 

As well as being used to make manicured lawns, grasses are foods – corn, rice and wheat are, in fact, grasses. Then there are those grasses we pay little attention to - immigrant grasses that find their place on roadsides and in undergrowth. The botanist Charles Edward Hubbard (1900-80), an expert on grasses, observed: ‘it is estimated there are about six-hundred-and-twenty genera and ten-thousand species of grasses throughout the world. Of these, only fifty-four genera and between one-hundred-and-fifty and one-hundred-and-sixty species are indigenous to or naturalised in the British Isles.’

Plants from other nations are celebrated in botanical gardens as exotic species, and nations are often quick to adopt and naturalise charismatic flowers as their own. Colonisation is as much about plants as it is land and people. Cultivation of wild roses for their smell, for example, began in China some five-thousand years ago, and they arrived in the UK with the Romans. Apples, roses and green grass lawns have become symbols of Britishness, adopted as national signifiers.

Apples too arrived from elsewhere: they originated in the Arab world more than four-thousand years ago. They have been grown in the UK as a cultivated crop since the Roman occupation, but slowly disappeared in the thirteenth century with the arrival of the Plague, of droughts and the Wars of the Roses (1455-85). Apples returned when King Henry VIII introduced orchards to Kent, and for the next three-hundred years apples were a luxury fruit. Today apples, like wild grasses, are everyday and, in the UK alone, two-thousand-five-hundred varieties have been developed.

“Hunting Wild Grasses” is a celebration of plant migration.