The False Banana Pavilion

Working with the team at Wakehurst, the programmes brief was to explore and bring to life an aspect of Kew’s world-leading international science projects through immersive artworks.

FleaFolly worked with Kew research fellow James Borrell, to explore and celebrate the remarkable Enset plant, a climate-smart crop of the future otherwise known as the tree against hunger or the false banana.

A large rectangular wooden frame, standing at 6m in height and 3.2m-square in footprint, is clad in a variety of natural materials commonly found in and around Wakehurst. The pavilion is dressed in layers of hazel hurdle panels and compressed water reed sheets. These base materials are overclad in bands of long grass thatch that have been cut and crafted to create a decorative and geometric set of forms not normally associated with natural materials such as these. A layer of gothic, willow ‘shields’ wrap and adorn all four sides, whilst the pavilion is topped with a Sarass grass ‘haircut’.

Upon entering, one is faced with a contrasting full-height pyramidal-shaped space that is clad in over 900 CNC-Cut birch plywood Enset leaves, each individually stained in gradient bands of reds to greens to show the diverse colour spectrum of the Enset. Each leaf is engraved with a different landrace (variety of Enset species) and its corresponding location in Ethiopia as a way to help visualise the Enset’s unique ability to withstand and adapt to changing and adverse geographical conditions within which it grows. The pavilion pays homage to both the Enset and the surrounding wild landscape of Wakehurst that attempts to take often-tricky scientific concepts and translate them into something more visually accessible.