"Mona Caron is a San Francisco-based artist, engaging in muralism & street art, illustration, art-ivism, and photography. Her focus is on community-informed and site-specific public art .
She has created murals in the US, throughout South America and in
Europe, creates stop-motion mural animations, has freelanced as an
illustrator, and engages in artivism with social and environmental movements. Born and raised in the Centovalli region of Ticino, Switzerland, Mona
owes her love of botany and the natural form to her childhood's natural
environment and to her mother's teachings."
"In recent years, Mona’s stop-motion animation and botanical mural series titled ”WEEDS",
a metaphor about resilience, has been growing, just like its
namesakes, both in numbers and geographic reach, as well as in the scale
of her pieces."It is her work on weeds which interests me most, as she describes it very similarly when compared alongside my work for the Drawing Workshop and considerations on urban self seeded plants in the cityscape. As well as what conceptual meanings we can assign to them.
"They may be tiny but they break through concrete. They are everywhere and yet unseen. And the more they get stepped on, the stronger they grow back.
This is a series of paintings of urban weeds, created as a tribute to the resilience of all those beings who no one made room for, were not part of the plan, and yet keep coming back, pushing through and rising up.
I look for weeds in the city streets near a wall I'm about to paint. When I find a particularly heroic one growing through the pavement, I paint it big, at a scale inversely proportional to the attention and regard it gets.
I paint all kinds of spontaneous urban vegetation: both invasive an
d endemic species. Both get eradicated as weeds when they get caught trespassing our enclosures. Yet they come back, always at the front lines, carving a path for the rest of nature to follow."
The placement of her pieces always mirror this conceptual consideration, as they fit the curving, natural forms of the plants into the strong planes and lines of human architecture, much like the real life plants themselves fit and bend their forms into the cracks of anywhere they can sustain life. By supersizing these plants, and also saturating their colours she changes them from the unwanted and marginalized to the impressive and decorative. I also think her concepts draw closely to those discussed by Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman in 'Documents in Contemporary Art; Nature' about pest or 'r-rated' species; 'Yet we are both fascinated by this issue of r-selected species [such as weeds, insects or small rodents whose chief defence against unstable environments is rapid reproduction rather than adaptation]. I imagine this is because these animals and plants have a direct relationship to extinction - the focus of both our practices for several years. [...] These creatures are constant reminders of our part in the biological contract. They remind us that, like all animals, we are implicated in a set of relations with other animals, that we do not benefit from some of those relationships.'Caron goes into this in more explicit, colloquial terms on her website, alongside a stopmotion animation created whilst painting her works.
'Well, I'm reclaiming the pejorative term "weeds", owning it, as it describes not the plants' intrinsic value but their action. Whether invasive species or benign wildflowers, plants act as weeds when they appear clandestinely, autonomously, in surprising urban places. This is why I create some of these murals as on-site animations: to let the paintings not just BE, but ACT like weeds. [...]The action of urban weeds is symbolic of the invisible multitudes of un-valued living beings, whatever their origin, who exist at the margins, but not without gaining strength there. They may disturb when they their numbers can no longer be ignored. But in the context of suffocated environments, these undesirables are the first to carve a path for the rest of nature to follow, in due time.'
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