To a monoculture rhythm we type, tap and utter as contemporary communication is carried through rubber vessels. Forming insulation for deep sea wires, the gaskets holding touchscreens in place, the adhesive between the leaves of books, the resinous sap of the gutta-percha tree is the common glue that buoys modern information distribution.

The binding of present-day connectivity to this quick setting rubber, however, enshrouds our speech in colonial residue. This natural latex was ‘discovered’ by the East India Company during its subjugation of Singapore in the early 19th Century. It was quickly moulded into the boots, machine belts and machete handles that enabled the violent replacement of endemic ecologies with plantations of Palaquium Gutta trees. Concurrent to this great verdant upheaval, gutta paste bound the leaves of Robinson Crusoe reprints, thus adhering itself to the dissemination of nature as separate other.

Nonetheless, gutta-percha achieved its greatest propinquity with British imperialism as its waterproof and malleable resin insulated inchoate deep-sea wires, materialising the cartographic red lines of shipping routes under the ocean. This deep black latex thus came to actualise the cartographic centring of Great Britain as the crux of a global distributive web. Indelibly expediting the transmission of information across the globe, and simultaneously, the transfer of colonial knowledge systems, the resin came to both insulate and connect.

Beyond its sustained use in present-day wires, gutta percha has continued its intrusion of both sea and land into the body itself through its contemporary proliferation in dental fillings. Thus, the spine of contemporary speech – our texts, emails, photo messages, even the utterances dislodged from our very jaws – are coated in its latent colonial extraction.

This work presents a personal rubber lexicon, my filled teeth - both inner and outer molars - and dented gutta-dependant phone screen, both cast in gum collected from a nursery at Cambridge Botanic Gardens. They are presented in a jewellery box that echoes those gifted by the British Empire, containing sections of submarine wire, to states newly connected to the imperial metropole.