"We stand at a historic moment of planetary transition, where old systems lose their grip and new ways of integrating with life, where we reclaim our relationship with the land, its myriad species, and the radical imagination that holds us all, pushes through the cracks in the concrete."
Meet Elisabet Kedziora
Behind Kashubi is Elisabet, a botanical connoisseur devoted to the art of smoking. Her roots reach back to Kashubia in northern Poland where smoking once belonged to both medicine and everyday life. After Elisabet’s father’s passing, her love and deep knowledge of the wonders of botany together with a wish to preserve his Kashubian heritage, was the seed that became Kashubi.
Her artwork and scholarship has always been interdisciplinary as Elisabet does not view the living world as an object to be studied, but as a profound, ongoing conversation. Her doctoral research at Åbo Akademi, where she explored the notebooks of Hilma af Klint through a posthumanist lens and Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species, provided an academic rigor to a lifelong intuition: that we must position ourselves within the tapestry of life, rather than hovering above it.
Elisabet’s work is a direct challenge to the Western gaze that for centuries has sought to separate the human from the earth. Whether through the reductionism of modern science or the grand narratives of the Abrahamic traditions, this separation has left us adrift. Her practice serves as a counter-movement and a bridge between the deep cultural history of plants, such as the essence of the rose and the wisdom of herbal medicine, and the humble, grounded act of placing hands in the soil.
To Elisabet, botany is an encounter with an ancient lineage of intelligence. Plants are beings that inhabited this earth hundreds of millions of years before the arrival of the human. We are the newcomers in this vast symbiosis, and Elisabet’s passion lies in rediscovering how to live as humble guests and allies to these green wisdom-keepers.
This philosophy breathes through her creation of gardens. She is currently sculpting her third landscape, exploring the architecture of scent to create a sanctuary that speaks to the senses throughout the seasons. Through her field notes, her art, and her lectures, she invites us to stop seeing nature as a backdrop and start seeing it as a vocal participant in our shared future.
In Elisabet’s world, the garden is a laboratory for the soul and art is a form of deep listening. She reminds us that to plant is to dream a more livable world into being, walking once more in rhythm with the more-than-human world.
Lectures
Want to book Elisabet for a lecture or workshop in botany? Email elisabet@kashubi.com
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