Bethan Hughes. Elastic Continuum
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Rubber is one of the most ubiquitous materials in our daily lives, yet we rarely stop to consider its origins. If we do, we might picture it as something impersonal—an industrial product tapped from distant trees or churned out by synthesic chemistry. Elastic Continuum tells a different story. At its center is Taraxacum koksaghyz, a little-known dandelion subspecies hailed as a strategic resource and rubber alternative. By assembling the improbable biography of this resilient plant, artist Bethan Hughes has unearthed a complex history of empires, experiments, and entanglements.
The book unfolds along two braided paths: one follows the dandelion’s east-to-west trajectory through sites of political ambition and wartime scarcity—tracing its role in Soviet laboratories and Nazi-occupied Poland to Cold War-era research in the US and recent EU sustainability projects. The other traces Hughes’s own west-to-east journey as she encounters the plant in living form and archival documents—across breeding facilities, mountain valleys, scientific laboratories, herbaria, and vernacular networks of memory. Together, these threads form a lyrical, deeply researched account of vegetal persistence, human intervention, and the quiet power of overlooked species.
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