Power Plants

Semi-perm public art for Town of Chapel Hill, 2018. With Mollie Earls.

North Carolina and the southeastern U.S. are rich in botanical diversity. Our latitude, weather patterns and geography allow an unusual number of valuable and useful plants to thrive here. For hundreds of years, native people and settlers foraged and cultivated herbs, barks, roots and flowering plants for medicinal uses, many of which are still grown and widely used today. “Power Plants” wraps Chapel Hill’s Town Hall generator with a design inspired by this history.

Our design incorporates illustrations of medicinal plants found in NC from scientific and botanical journals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also references the Wallace Brothers’ Botanical Co., a massive, 54,000 sq. ft. Herbarium and “Botanic Depot” in Statesville — the largest of its kind in the United States, and perhaps the world, during its peak in the late 1800s. The Wallace Bros. chief botanist, Mordecai E. Hyams, collected and cataloged hundreds of plants, greatly contributing to our understanding of the flora of the state and region.