An artist honours an immigrant cabbage in the Liberties

Cristina Nicotra hunched over like a weary pilgrim and walked slowly through the gallery space.

She wore a pale green and white dyed cloak of antique cotton, the texture and colour of cabbage leaves.

Embroidered on the cloak were a Celtic triskele and a Sicilian trinacria. Her hands clasped the sawn-off limb of tree, with long strips of Irish and Italian wool stretched and tied to its branches.

Every detail, a hint towards the same story. “I wanted to honour the travels that this cabbage has made,” she said later.

She moved across one of the two exhibition rooms, over a red velvety quilt laid out on the floor. A crowd of some 30 people gathered for Friday’s Culture Night event, watched in silence, their backs almost pressed to the wall.

With each step, Nicotra lifted the tree staff slightly and moved it forward. It thudded on the wooden floor, over and over.

The intense march took no more than a minute and then she stopped.

“So this is the travel of the wild cabbage,” she said, her face striped with black and blue paint. “All the way from the shores of the Mediterranean sea all the way to Dublin 8 to flourish and get wild again.”

She turned and trudged back through the door from where she entered.

Cabbage gone wild

Twenty minutes later, Nicotra stood out on Hume Street above GalleryX, still in her makeup, with a pouch of tobacco in her hand.

Her brief performance, which she was due to give a second time later that evening, was a part of her ongoing Wild Cabbage project, she says.

The project looks at Brassica oleracea, she said. “I started this last year, because I had a special relationship with this wild cabbage.”

The cabbage is growing in a wild space behind the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) also known as the NCAD Field, she said.

The field used to be a derelict car park, says Gareth Kennedy who is in charge of the plot.

A retired businessman and fertiliser expert, Tony Lowth, repurposed it, with help from students, college staff and locals, says Kennedy. “It became a haven for organic horticulture.”

It holds an unusual mix of cultivated and wild plants, Kennedy says. “What was brilliant about the site is that you could introduce students to the idea of what plants are wild, what is domestic, what’s cultivated.”

A lot of plants in the field, notably its kale plants, which also belongs to the Brassica oleracea group, started to re-wild, he says. “These started to self-seed and grow on their own.”

Personal parallels

Nicotra is a textile artist.

She comes from a family of tailors in Sicily, she says. “I worked with textiles as a child.”

In the summer of 2023, she did a postgrad course in NCAD study art and ecology. And, discovered the cabbage growing in the college’s field, she says.

She started to research it, she says. “Because, and it’s weird to say, but I had some personal connection to the plant.”

The wild cabbage, according to the Royal Horticultural Society, is native to the United Kingdom.

It was, for a long time, considered a native crop in Ireland, she says.

But, as she studied the origins of its cultivation, she found that it may have come from much further afield, possibly descending from Brassica cretica, a species native to the eastern Mediterranean – and far closer to her birthplace, she says. “So there was a personal connection there.”

Over centuries, this crop had travelled westward, evolving until it reached Irish shores, she says. “And it got wild. So people thought it was native. But it’s actually not. It’s coming from somewhere else.”

The idea that it too had ended up migrating from the Mediterranean to Dublin 8, only to end up in the once-derelict field beside NCAD, led Nicotra to draw a parallel with her own life.

And what fascinated her was how a non-native species of plant was embraced as native, she says. “It was native and not native, at the same time.”

Kennedy, the custodian of the NCAD Field, says how the cabbage arrived in Ireland is unclear.

“I don’t know if the Vikings had cabbage. Or the monks. But it ties in with the idea of what we call native,” he says.

“But, plants and people, things have always moved around. These stories of how they change, adapt and become a part of people’s culture are really important stories to tell,” he says.

Its place in the NCAD Field, among plants that had slowly migrated from different corners of the world, embodies a cosmopolitan city, Nicotra says. “Plants from all over live together, flourish together here.

“So the idea of transforming yourself in a new environment and contributing, this is the concept that fascinated me,” she says.

Like a plant, a person changes as they travel and encounter new experiences, Nicotra says. “You’re transforming and finding your home.”