Cotton
Cotton Field, 2015
Rebecca Louise Law
Installation
Materials: 2040 Cotton stems
Ravenscroft Park, England
Rebecca Louise Law
Installation
Materials: 2040 Cotton stems
Ravenscroft Park, England
English artist Rebecca Louise Law choose a plant that carries a lot of history-- cotton. She had created an interactive community-based artwork in an English park, which she encouraged viewers to ‘pick’ a stem of cotton, creating their own route and own history through the artwork.
Cotton, a fiber, an ancient shrub, and an old trade product, is native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, such as the Americas, Africa, Egypt, and India. Other counties you can find wild cotton is in Australia, China, and the Middle East. While the greatest diversity of the cotton species can be found in the Americas, specifically in Mexico. Cotton was traded and independently domesticated in both the Old and New Worlds.
The soft, fluffy staple fiber grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds. Cotton is known as the Gossypium genus of the mallow family Malvaceae. There are four commercially cultivated species of cotton. Three of these spices had originated in sandy, moist soils in poor countries such as the rocky hills of India, China and on the west coast of Africa.
The earliest evidence of cotton has been dated to the Neolithic Age or 5th millennium BC in an Indian subcontinent at the site of Mehrgarh and Rakhigarhi where cotton threads have been found being preserved in copper beads. Researchers and archeologists also found cotton bolls in a cave near Tehuacán, Mexico, dating back as early as 5500 BC.
Fast forwarding to the 1600s, the English East India Company introduced the British to the fiber. This plant had caused many issues for Britain when it was first introduced. By the 1700s, the British finally adapted to the cotton economy. Cotton was first spun by machinery in England in 1730. The industrial revolution in England and the invention of the cotton gin in the U.S. paved the way for the important place cotton holds in the world today.
For a crazy fact, China's Change 4 Lander brought cotton seed sprouts to the far side of the Moon and announced a cotton seed sprouted, the first "truly otherworldly plant in history."