Celebrated Sheffield-based artist Jessica Heywood and Sheffield historian Phil Withington will create an installation exploring the botanical dimensions of Europe’s psychoactive revolution.
They will demonstrate the social importance and the relationship between herbs and plants, global modernity, and different states of intoxication.
They will be joined by Colin Osborne from Biosciences for their talk, who will be explaining the archaeological and ancient historic context of crop spread.
The installation will also provide a space for people to reflect on their own ideas and concerns about intoxicants.
The intoxicants at the heart of Europe’s first ‘psychoactive revolution’ included locally produced alcohols (fermented and distilled), which underwent processes of industrialization during the period, as well as Atlantic commodities like tobacco, sugar, and cacao and Asian substances like opium, coffee, and tea.
The installation will represent varieties of species identified, harvested, and transplanted for these processes: hops and grains as well as sugar cane, nicotiana and poppies.
Millennium Gallery opening times Tuesday–Saturday: 10am–5pm (closed Mondays) Sunday: 11am–4pm