Dandelion Roots

During the first year of the COVID‐19 pandemic, I kept a graphic diary titled Dandelion Roots. The format was simple: in a single black‐and‐white line drawing from a square of paper I would document something encountered (during periods of lockdown, this would normally be on my daily allotted walk). Overlaid on the same page, I would arrange words in an attempt to articulate whatever was on my mind: reflections on gender, identity, ecology, and relationality. The tight format forced me to distill what were often complex internal dialogues. Though posted online and via social media, the work was not conceived as a set of definitive statements but as a way of sharing my thinking process. By documenting seemingly inconsequential everyday encounters alongside critical reflection, I attempted to work the material and the discursive together. Here I was not necessarily seeking coherence but rather contextualizing my thinking process within a wider relational ecology, allowing word and image to form relationships of their own. Working matter and discourse, body and mind together was a consciously trans (queer, feminist) strategy: trans experience offers an insight into the inseparability of these domains (Berlin and Brice 2022; Clare 2017). The COVID‐19 pandemic imposed conditions of isolation (and for some, extreme exposure), while also foregrounding an existential condition of interdependence (Malatino 2022; Pieri 2022; Pienaar et al. 2021). It thereby highlighted a paradox: that vulnerability is simultaneously a condition of susceptibility to harm and a necessary condition of possibility for meaningful relation (Brice 2020, 2023). Vulnerability is a product of inequity and injustice, yet without vulnerability, transformative social change may not be possible. This interested me because it chimed with an apparent paradox of gender transition: that of becoming more fully realized through becoming more vulnerable. I handed in a PhD thesis at the very start of lockdown, amid a freeze on academic hires in the UK. The project filled a hiatus and provided a space in which to continue reflecting on this question of vulnerability, and on the politics of nature and ecologies of identity, themes that define my practice as geographer and artist.