Dirt Gems is a plant oracle deck and guidebook designed to invite you into a more personal and subtle relationship with the plant world. It is a practice of listening and observation. Creating relationships with the nonhuman world requires that we slow down, decenter ourselves, and learn from the intelligence of the silken spider web, the humming saltmarsh, carnivorous bog plants, and desert superblooms.
Made in collaboration by Chelsea Granger & Anne Louise Burdett, this project contains 65 beautiful plant paintings, with a guidebook containing full descriptions of each plant, instructions on how to use the deck and the suits where they are grouped. This is a wellspring, it is a deep clear pool to dive into, emerging with your own beloved understanding of what these plants can mean to you, your life, and the greater community. This project is an invitation to come back, to the source, to where we have always belonged and towards where we must orient ourselves for a hopeful and bright future; forest, swamp, mountain, ocean.
"We are seeing our world changing rapidly. This project is designed to stir the memories of what it feels like to know that we are nature, never separate from it. If we can find our way back to understanding our role in this greater ecology, we can find our way forward."
Anne Louise Burdett is an agroecologist, conservation scientist, clinical herbalist, and educator. Much of her career has been geared towards community organizing around food and health justice. She has a masters in marine conservation and climate resilience and has shifted focus towards the ocean. Anne Louise is interested in working at the amphibious edges of land and sea, at the intersection of anthropogenic impact and changing ecosystems; their vulnerabilities and interdependencies. Currently, her work is focused on climate change adaptation and resilience and community-based natural resource sharing and management. She works primarily in restoration projects focused on seagrass, corals, mangroves and seaweed, as well as alternative livelihoods in fishing communities. Anne Louise is also a writer and dancer with works focused on land-based storytelling, stewardship, and play.
Her approach is through a lens of mutual aid, scientific literacy, and outright wonder.
https://zellandthewhale.com
@zellandthewhale
Chelsea Granger is a multidisciplinary artist. Painting, drawing, illustration, murals, and tattoos are the foundation of her practice. She recently self-published a zine about death and grief titled So Many Ways to Draw a Ghost. After the death of her mom as well as a dear friend, she started seeing her art as a way to sing up life, with the hope that her art can act as a doorway to create conversations about death and grief. Chelsea’s art is of the everyday, inspired by the overlap of earth/spirit dimensions, and woods as church. She is interested in painting as medicine, painting as a portal, painting as a spell. Her work has been exhibited across the Northeast, and her murals exist across New England. For more than twelve years, Chelsea has collaborated with Thyme Herbal, making medicine posters and zines. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree in painting from UMass-Amherst and a certificate in therapeutic recreation from Gateway Community College. Her work celebrates life while honoring death and walking gently into the unknown.
https://chelseagranger.com
@chelseairisgranger
