Lily Kwong has spent the last 15 years away from her hometown of San Francisco, collecting the tools and research in her journey of constructing site-specific mise en abymes of the ecological world at the junction of nature and industry. She’s been recognized in her role as the first woman and person of color to design the New York Botanical Garden’s annual orchid show and has been featured at Art Basel Miami beach with her piece “Moongates.” This last year, she had finished a project in Madison Square Park titled Gardens of Renewal and a site specific installation at the Night Gallery in Los Angeles titled “Subterrestrial and Solis.” 

Most recently, Kwong is unveiling a new project in downtown San Francisco, titled Earthseed Dome. The eponymous title, originating from the Octavia Butler Parable series, references the fictional religious group, Earthseed. The group’s mantra “God is change” alludes to the idea that the only certainty in life is change. “This idea that everything is constantly changing and that the earth really has this regenerative power. I wanted to kind of tap into the energy of that [idea], both the hopefulness [of it] but also at the same time—there’s so much destruction—of just embracing this constant change and cycling of materials, philosophies, structures, and it feels like we’re at that moment,” she tells of the project. 

The project breaks down the rigid lines of public art as something to see but not to interact with, negotiating the boundaries within the median of these spaces. Kwong’s latest site-specific installation is a biotic satellite holding bits and pieces of embryonic information from the surrounding native coniferous forests. Utilizing a material printing process, the creation of the large format seed sculpture is experimental in nature. The structure of the external shell is made from a geo mix of limestone and recycled marble, holding in the inside of this earthen bonbon containing an internal store of iron, clay, compost seeds, soil, rice husks, and starch. Translating organic form, to synthesized code, to a mechanical process reconstituted in the printed form. 

“It is really interesting to think about the possibilities of merging the technologies that are available to us and the natural building materials that have been used for centuries, and what are ways that can emerge from a collaboration between these two things,” Kwong shares of the project.  

Working with Nina Raj at the Altadena Seed Library, Kwong has curated a composition of plants native to San Francisco like California poppies, fivespots, and blue flax. A resocialization of nature of sorts, the seed packets are designed in a communal approach to pollination, encouraging the visiting human population to participate in this mnemonic act of carrying seeds to the wind. 

As it stands (literally and metaphorically speaking), redwoods are the tallest eukaryotic organisms in the modern world. With roots extending down around around 2% of the overall tree length, it’s only able to withstand the burden of its own height through a vast network of roots that extend laterally so as to weave together with the adjoining trees. Much like the symbolic redwood seed sitting in the center of the plaza,  Kwong is the latest in the ICA’s programming and the first of the institution’s satellite exhibitions within San Francisco, laying down lateral roots, rekindling the faded intimacy between the natural world and that of the human experience.