Homecoming Book Launch and In-Conversation

Join us for the homecoming book launch for ‘With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me’, an art-ecology-belonging book made by the Todmorden-based artist Yan Wang Preston. The book was published in July 2025 by The Eriskay Connection (NL) in partnership with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (UK).

The launch will be delivered as a conversation between Yan Wang Preston (artist), Kate Kinoshita (poet) and Cosima Towneley, all three are local contributors for the book. The conversation will be followed by a special screening of the ‘With Love. From an Invader.’ film, poetry reading by Kate and book signing.

On 17 March 2020, Yan set off to photograph a love-heart-shaped Rhododendron ponticum bush at Shedden Clough, Burnley, Lancashire (between Maidens Cross car park on Long CauseWay and Hurstwood Reservoir.) The plan was to photograph it every other day for an entire year, always at half an hour before sunset, always from the same angle. She did so to question the widely accepted term ‘non-native invasive species’, which is used to describe, and often degrade, many non-native species in the UK, including the Rhododendron ponticum. Now, five years later, with 400 photographs from Yan’s work, 10 interdisciplinary essays and two archive images collections from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the book ‘With Love. From an Invader. – Rhododendrons, Empire, China and Me’ journeys through landscapes, histories and emotions, revealing a plant entangled in questions of empire, ecology and belonging.

Having been launched in Edinburgh and already distributed globally, the book is finally coming home to Todmorden, where the artworks originated and where many of its contributors live. We hope to share the book with our very interesting local co-inhabitants, to discuss what it means to live, move, and belong in a world that often marks the human and more-than migrant as ‘the other.’