JONN GALE

JONN GALE is a London-based ethnobotanist whose interdisciplinary practice unfolds across ecotonal lines—along zones of transition between divergent forms of knowledge. Through archival investigation and site-responsive practice, she approaches botanical specimen not as inert objects or data but as historical actors mediating relationships across time, species, and epistemologies. Her work centres material thinking and embodied knowledge, engaging with plant matter through touch, smell, and proximity to activate nonverbal, sensory forms of understanding. These tactile exchanges aim to challenge the distanced gaze of colonial science, and invite a reorientation toward relational, and situated modes of knowing. Gale reimagines the botanical archive as a living, collaborative, and multispecies space—one that resists linear narratives and extractive logics. Positioned at the porous boundary between science and storytelling, scholarship and practice, Gale’s work cultivates ecotone as both method and metaphor: a site of friction, translation, and the emergence of alternative collective futures, where science, memory, and myth coalesce in generative tension.

Jonn Gale is currently undertaking a practice-led, AHRC/CHASE-funded collaborative doctorate at Birkbeck, UOL, and the Linnean Society of London, investigating the contributions of Black naturalists to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural knowledge and developing a decolonial framework for botanical archival research.

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