10/27/2025
Our final show, One More Round has concluded but we wanted to share more about the artists and work in the show:
Janna Wardle
Lagniappe
paper flowers, pockets from reclaimed jeans, crepe paper, acrylic, yarn
4’ x 3’ 9”
The propagation wall was her lagniappe, her little something extra that unlocked the key to a new understanding of the fundamental nature of reality.
Once she started growing food, she wanted to prioritize space for edible plants. But at first they weren’t super productive. She enriched the soil with kitchen scraps like eggshells and coffee grounds, but it wasn’t until she started planting flowers, just for beauty, that the pollinators really arrived and the garden tipped over into abundance.
And she got it. It was a different view of reality altogether. Not a zero-sum model where if you added one thing you had to take away another. But a different kind of math. Where you added a flower and it actually helped the vegetable.
She had unlocked the secret of the universe, or at least the truth of the natural world. Scarcity didn’t really exist, or if it did, it was man-made, existing in factory systems. Abundance was how nature worked. If you added something, it didn’t take away from the overall system. It made everything else better. It was the lagniappe. And beauty, it was necessary.
Once she had grown one plant from seed, it was easy to propagate many more as she wanted with her pocket system. It was almost infinite possibility. That was the year her garden went from being tiny to taking over the whole yard, and she jokingly called it her pocket garden. She was awed by the exponential growth. Neighborhoods at this time were particularly devoid of insect life, and as her plants began to grow, she and her little daughter were thrilled to discover a host of new pollinator friends.
Janna is a multimedia artist whose work explores an alternate, matriarchal timeline in which women thrive. A recovering pastry chef, she focuses her work on the beauty of the natural world and the celebration of traditional women’s work. She lives and works in Louisville with her husband, their children, and a black cat named Lily
