5 minute Video

Unit Three Video Text

Before the MA my work was mostly painting and drawing of the landscape, which had begun to feel thin and overly self conscious. I wanted to see the Earth more expansively, unearthing unresolved feelings of personal and collective grief and move my looking into understanding and participation. I have spent much of the past two years researching the ways in which the word ‘landscape’ no longer feels relevant to me, questioning notions of landscape as a ‘de facto’ image towards reciprocity and where I might create work that embodies a sense of mutuality with the landscape. I began to interrogate Western histories of seeing landscapes along a trajectory of picture plane with the viewpoint of the passive, distanced human separate from place; I began to observe lines in the landscape as no longer weaving through topographical elements but running along political boundaries and borders that divide place into units for the purposes of land management in our tireless quest for agricultural and economic growth. In this context, regarding the Earth from an assumption of consuming the image of a beautiful place feels out of sync, unethical, with the climate challenges we face and I realised that painting and drawing the landscape as an image on a surface was creating a barrier to understanding how place might shape my own life experiences, memories and futures, including belonging, loss, death and renewal.

My family and I bought a renovation project in Wiltshire two years ago and chain sawing up the surrounding neglected, ailing hedges and trees, creating huge piles of trimmings and arboreal remains, captured my interest amidst my early suspicions that my understanding of landscape was drifting towards obsolescence and I started drawing the tangled piles of discarded branches, finding them more interesting than their living counterparts. Over time I watched their discarded limbs sink slowly back into the ground as decay set in, heating and rotting like a huge composting death pyre. The idea of our natural world as a memento mori has long captured my imagination and I return to our collective land as a shared tumulus in my work time and again. If there have been 117 billion humans to have walked our earth plus all the other-than-human, most are recollected only in the way that they form the dirt upon which those of us still breathing walk. 

My drawings in the first year of my MA were an intuitive leap into a trajectory that is making more sense to me where the picture plane makes space instead for ‘inside’ the Earth imaginings, seeing firstly the upended roots of trees as metaphors but then seeing them as portals into underground thinking where the critters reside, where networks of mycelium, tunnel diggers, wormery networks and other minibeasts dominate an entirely ‘other’ realm. I began making drawings of and from my compost heap, which I regarded as a metaphor for wider decay and renewal, as well as visible source material for observing networks and reciprocity of natural systems. The compost heap has also offered a beautiful parallel in my learning as an artist and person, abandoning outdated thinking and composting my work in the hope of a richer, humus of knowledge and expression.

My unit one feedback encouraged a new approach to materials and I began to teach myself what the compost had to offer in terms of materiality leading to creating my own charcoal from the fallen trees and hedges, experimenting with paper making and casting, liquid paper, compost humus ink made from the Earthly goo that seeps out of the decaying, burning heap of spent organic rubble. I have been shredding, boiling and blending up kitchen waste with recycled paper and garden compost matter as a way of climbing inside the discarded organic physicality of recycling and understanding what my surroundings are made of. I left the drawings outside for days to watch the decaying process with help from the worms and crawlies. The liquid paper was drawn into fragile networks of lace or drawn onto paper. The drawings are made, recycled and returned to the compost heap for the cycle to begin again.

This has been one of my most important learnings over the past two years: summoning the courage to dismantle a lifetime of art making, to compost it and begin again from scratch with no knowledge of how to progress an idea. I have started to trust the kernel stage of ideation where the exploration of a small thought, a fragment of interest without context, forms the basis for future theory-making. I still want to paint, work with indigo dyes and gold and I am still grappling with the many contradictions, inconsistencies and technical frustrations going forward, but these new avenues and multiplicity of possibility for expression have seduced me into the knowledge that I will never again feel beholden to one material or another, one approach or another.

The Research Paper has proven critical in consolidating and expanding my ideas of what drawing might be and regarding place with rigorous interrogation of the semiotics of kindness, brutality and pathos and the empathetic encounter. I am developing ideas and theories of kinship that facilitate helpful strategies for being in an era of exceptionalism, toxic individuality and dys-kindness.

The RP also facilitated a shift in my own drawing towards an edge-less-ness, interweaving this with my older ideas of drawings as continuous traces (of place, memory, non specific ‘thing-ness’) with blunt cuts that punctuate the stories, events and circumstances of lives. A more expansive approach to drawing has meant I am exploring paper making and casting alongside sewn ‘lines’ and events within the paper; piled up assemblages of drawing fragments to suggest hungry edges, unfixed by time nor border; casting kitchen waste such as cabbage leaves into paper reflections on subjective/objective; weaving found organic matter into paper pulp then into nest formations and spatially ambiguous forms that question edge-less-ness but also paper as more than a material but also a medium and concept, symbolic in its history of use for the spread of written knowledge as well as analogous with green models for packaging and plastic alternatives. Participation in an act of expanded drawing that expresses kinship between self and place through the wisdom of cellulose is emerging as an ecologically positive and artistically thrilling process that I continue to explore.

I have spent time investigating Chinese painting and the visual references to the archives of my own memory and questioning historical stories of my own ancestry where place intersects with time. Colonial histories

I see the natural world through the lens of this oscillation between decay and renewal, a memorialisation of belonging and loss; a type of visual archaeology where life and death are embedded in layers of organic matter and memory coding. Ecological chaos and ruination have become the context of my surroundings and I see these symbols of remembrance and shared grief but also cautious hope as expressions of my own internal and external landscapes.

I feel like the compost works and paintings I am also making in the studio are becoming boneyards. Not landscapes or reflected places but tapestries of spent being. Not being a religious person I have often balked at the thought of graveyards and have never visited those where my loved ones are laid to rest. I feel tremendous comfort in the idea that we live and die as individuals but in death we return our borrowed molecules and residuum to Nature where life continues its unabated cycles. Forgotten but recollected, re-collected. Our existence is so brief but our deaths go on forever