Think of a plant. Is it a tree? Or is it a houseplant?

The ground is the basis of the terrestrial environment, where the normative plant is rooted. Without the ground there would be no sky, or without the sky we would know no ground. The ground is our grounds of habitation and habit. We habitually water our houseplants. Plants turn the air into ground. Plants disappear into the background. Plants are the background, but they transmit promiscuous signals and receive them, too. When the glaciers melted they deposited seeds.

The midwest is a flattened ground, a hosting substrate of swampy soil, a flatness between the coasts. Chicago sits atop this plane, a plain that was the bottom of the ancient glacial Lake Chicago. Imagine tall trees in a swamp. Chicago’s early skyscrapers floated on clay, the floors now tilting, artifacts of settling into the uneven and shifting layers of muddy glacial deposit. Midway through the century an attachment to the bedrock anchored new buildings taller and upright, this attachment affording their heroic reach upward. The tallest building in Chicago is tallest at its antenna.

An epiphyte is a type of plant that has no attachment to the ground. Growing on trees or other raised surfaces, the relationship is neither symbiotic nor parasitic. The roots of an epiphyte seek darkness, extending downward along the surfaces of its grounded hosts toward the shade of the forest floor. Epiphytes are over-represented in the houseplant world, as they can withstand the darker interiors of buildings. The houseplants in Chicago recede into the interiors of buildings attached to the bedrock beneath the city’s flat glacial lake or floating precariously on slabs of swampy clay.

Lindsey french’s non attachment to the ground reaches down in non-attachment to the ground, a promiscuous transmission in an extended moment of transition and cautious optimism to the bedrock beneath Chicago. - Reprinted from http://theradius.us/