Circularity

I made this process video for some submissions and the Graduate Showcase so putting it here for the record.

Describe your work in 50 words or fewer

These paper casts are made from kitchen scraps such as cabbage leaves cast using paper pulp from my garden compost heap and recycled household paper, memorialising beautiful, natural forms usually considered unworthy of grieving. The casts are meditations on ecological grief, modelling compassion for natural cycles and resources.

Written statement (maximum: 300 words)

Please give a brief written overview of your work.

I have spent the past two years questioning the ethics of drawing the landscape, developing work that embodies a sense of gentler, mutuality and participation with place. Drawing Kin collaborates with the compost heap in my garden, as a way to engage with place in a time of ecological chaos. I see my compost heap as a portal into underground thinking where networks of mycelium, tunnel diggers and other mini-beasts dominate an ‘other’ realm, which has inspired this body of work.

The work centres around paper making and casting, regarded within an expanded field of drawing, where discarded kitchen scraps from the kitchen compost bin are cast using beeswax and paper pulp made from compost and recycled paper. The paper cabbage leaves are memento mori, memorialising beautiful, natural forms usually considered unworthy of grieving. The pieces draw on a quiet form of kinship between self and other through the wisdom of cellulose.

The circularity of materials models compassion for the interconnectivity of natural cycles, supporting and sustaining future work: the beeswax is melted back down, the paper casts are returned to the compost heap. The process considers personal and collective grief, drawing as an act of radical kindness, generous attention-giving in the phenomenon of the empathetic drawing encounter. Casting as a ritual of compassion, a deep bow, the embodiment of grief for dead lavender, hives, mycelium, critters, nests and cabbage leaves, making kin in the process, becoming the paper and the paper becoming myself, all returned to the compost in the end. My work is about memorialising spent being, where we live and die as individuals but in death we return our borrowed molecules and residuum to the Earth’s compost where life continues its unabated cycles, linked in unimaginable loops and tangles, made and found, belonging and forgotten. 

300 words exactly.

Cast single cabbage leaf | Cast from recycled paper and compost debris