Saguaro Land: An artist uses invasive plants found at the bottom of a basin

Saguaro Land is a series from The Show looking at the Sonoran Desert — the lushest, hottest desert in the world that happens to be our home.

Artist Rebecca Pipkin works with invasive plants from a basin at South Mountain and transforms them into art. Pipkin boils down the plants into dye and then uses it on textiles she turns into sculpture. Sometimes she also turns the plant fibers into paper, which she also uses in her art.

Pipkin likes to refer to the plants she uses as non-native instead of invasive as what does and what doesn't qualify as an invasive species constantly changes. 

Mark Brodie/KJZZ

The Show took a trip down to the basin with Pipkin and she estimates she has visited the space roughly 80 to 90 times within the last two years. She doesn't find herself getting bored of the scenery as the basin itself never looks the same twice.

Full conversation

REBECCA PIPKIN: I have a hard time calling them invasive plants.

BRODIE: Non-native?

PIPKIN: Non-native or plants that are categorized as invasive because the categories for like what is invasive and what's not change a lot. And there are native plants that can often be categorized as invasive depending on how they change and how they adapt.

BRODIE: Rebecca Pipkin says this basin was dug out around 1940 as a place to collect water runoff from the mountains and prevent flooding.

PIPKIN: I started working down here about two years ago because people were dumping cuttings of plants that were categorized as invasive in the Sonoran Desert, cutting them down in the surrounding housing developments, especially during all this construction that's been going on, and dumping the plant cuttings down the basin, and then it would go to seed and it would rain, and there would be this ever-changing garden of waste that was kind of cycling through the bottom of this site.

BRODIE: To get a sense of her art and how the Sonoran Desert plays into it, I met Pipkin at the basin on a cloudy, drizzly morning earlier this spring.

PIPKIN: And I was collecting all those plants to make dyes with as a way to index participating in a local ecology. And that's kind of what these attunement walks have become as I've brought other people out here and continue to do this work and this research has been trying to think of ways to help people be present in the places in which we dwell and thinking about being participants as opposed to kind of just walking on the surface of the earth or walking on the surface of the desert. We actually are like deeply embedded in the ecology of the Sonoran Desert. and particularly here in Phoenix. And for me, it's particular to this basin.

BRODIE: Well, and in this case, we are literally going to be walking into the desert, like we're walking down into a hole in the desert?

PIPKIN: Yeah, exactly. But you get to kind of move through this site that holds you and think about like being small and something really vast.

BRODIE: Should we take a walk?

PIPKIN: Let's do it.

BRODIE: So Pipkin and I set off into the basin. As we hiked down, she says she became interested in the site because she was thinking about plants and the way living things move through the desert. She describes her work as site responsive and pays special attention to how the basin changes through the seasons and over time.

PIPKIN: We have a habit of like talking about places as these things that you can like put a fence around, when in reality a place is like an ever-changing thing. It's more of an event where there's a gathering of unique beings at any particular moment, and we get to participate in that. But at the same time, like you'll never, like the phrase, like you'll never stay in a river twice, same river twice, you'll never stay in the same basin twice.

BRODIE: Tell me a little bit about how you have seen this spot change, because it's obviously, it's very green right now. It's kind of a cloudy, mildly rainy morning here. So it's very green, very verdant. But I would imagine you come out here at other times of the year, it looks totally different.

PIPKIN: Totally different. Yeah, so if you come out here in the middle of the summer, it's gray. There's not a lot of things living and growing down at the bottom of the basin. It looks totally different when the Palo Verde are blooming. It looks totally different when the desert brush bushes, which are these plants right here. when they're blooming. And then there's this new, not, I mean, it's new to the Sonoran in a way, comparatively, but there's this new plant called, it's called careless weed. It's how a lot of people refer to it. And it's this like bright pink, fluffy weed that is categorized now as invasive. And so at certain times of the spring last year, this was like bright pink all the way through the bottom.

BRODIE: It must have been beautiful.

PIPKIN: Yeah, it was stunning. It was beautiful. This is actually the greenest I've ever seen it.

BRODIE: In addition to all the green around us, there were erosion paths all along the sides of the basin, tracking where water had gone down into it. Pipkin says she sometimes makes paper castings on those slopes, which she then turns into textiles or sculptural pieces. She considers them another way to index how the site has changed and continues to change, as well as to think about how transient living things adapt and locate themselves in a new environment.

PIPKIN: I grew up living all over and I've moved a lot in recent years. And so I was looking for these like metaphors in landscape that I could kind of relate to about like how people move and evolve and adapt to new places. And invasive plants, I read this great book called The Next Great Migration by Sonia Shah. And invasive plants just became one Ave. by which I could kind of think about and track how these things were moving.

BRODIE: As we continue walking, we get to a bit of a clearing at the bottom of the basin, and Pipkin stops. We pause just to look, listen, and feel. It's not huge down here, but there's a lot going on.

PIPKIN: Yeah, there is a lot going on. And, you know, when you look closely, it's not like a perfect nature preserve. It is a, it's a weird hole like in between this housing development. There's the water tank, there's city property, it's technically in the state park, but it's also like there's trash here. And so one of the things I think about a lot is, you know, what is nature and what do we classify as nature and like where do we assign value for nature?

BRODIE: Pipkin says the silence inside the basin really stands out, especially since downtown Phoenix is so close you can see it from the rim.

PIPKIN: We are really dwelling in an ecological system that was here before us and has adapted to us being here, and we have to adapt to living here as well.

BRODIE: Pipkin estimates she's been down there 80 or 90 times in the last two years and says a lot of her work is thinking about how to avoid getting numb to a place you spend so much time, but rather become sensitive to its intricacies.

PIPKIN: The language that we use to kind of describe our experiences as humans is really closely related to botany, like we're talking about being rooted or transplants or uprooted. And so the crossover between the way that plants move and exist in a landscape, I think, is deeply applicable to the way that humans do, too.

BRODIE: How did you come up with the idea to turn these plants into dyes?

PIPKIN: I mean, natural dyeing in textile arts is ancient. I feel really strongly that the forms that I have in my sculptural work, the colors that I have in my textile work, they're not made-up by me, but they're made kind of through mutual involvement between site and artist.

BRODIE: How do you think that doing this kind of work has changed your perception and your perspective of the desert?

PIPKIN: Yeah, I mean, I love the desert. I grew up on the beach. I've lived in mountainous areas. But for me, like the desert is ancient. It is like adaptable. It is survival, and yet it's flourishing continually. And so I think there's something really nice in thinking about how care is scalable. And if you can care about the way that like a particular plant that maybe doesn't quote belong here is moving through a basin in the middle of the city, that care is scalable to like many other things.

BRODIE: Pipkin says she likes the fact that just as the basin itself will never be the same twice, the dye she makes from the plant she collects there will similarly always be different, even if just slightly. For her, natural dyeing is a way to get to the essence of what a place is producing, literally boiling it down and extracting its most basic state. There's always an element of discovery, she says, just like the Sonoran Desert itself.