Jonn Gale
United Kingdom | Jan - Apr 2025
Jonn Gale is a London-based ethnobotanist working across botanical collections. Her work combines speculative analysis of historical and archival material, ethnobotanical research, and sensory-focused visual ethnography as a means of generating more multiverse, relational, process-focused, and horizontal botanical archival research practices. Her practice centers on nonlinearity, multi-species livability, and the agency, endurance, and affective temporalities of botanical objects as historical actors capable of narrating alternative histories.
She is currently undertaking a practice-led, AHRC/CHASE-funded collaborative doctorate at Birkbeck, UOL, and the Linnean Society of London, investigating the contributions of Black naturalists to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural knowledge. Her research involves the study of botanical specimens and manuscripts held at the Linnean Society, identifying and tracing hidden actors, mapping knowledge networks, and developing a new decolonial approach for recovering and sharing information from this archive.