“Nearly every place on earth has its own native species [of bean] and nearly every culture has depended on beans… Though all great agricultural societies have their own staple starch – wheat in the Middle East and Europe, rice in Asia, corn in the Americas – beans are one of the few foods common and indispensable to all. Because of their ubiquity, beans are one of the few foods that serve as a unit of analysis and comparison across time and space.”

(Ken Albala. Beans: A History. New York: Berg, 2007. pp. 1)

The bean – manipulated by man, reproduced in seemingly endless variety by nature – is an exemplary “natural” hybrid; a form laden with both the manipulations of man and Nature. The Hybrid Pod series explores this synthesis of the organic and the artificial through the creation of “hybridized” seedpods. The various pods within this series are composed of beans – seeds containing the reproductive material of the plant – encased/embedded in synthetic materials. The plastic, rubber, wax and nylon which replace the original shell of the bean, ultimately render the fertile beans sterile. As Michael Pollan observes, “All domestic plants are in some sense artificial, living archives of both cultural and natural information that people have helped to ‘design’” (Michael Pollan. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. pp. 195). This series ultimately explores a union of the “artificial” and the “natural”, again addressing modes of human and natural production and reproduction.