In Praise of Compost

As time marches on, I am back with my head in the compost, returning to my starting point of discarded trees and garden debris. I am making huge drawings with the compost, 30 metres at the moment. The pomposity of scale is more caution and self protection, to see what works and what doesn’t with plenty of left overs to create something for all the various shows and submissions I have knocking.

The various compost piles are really dry with all the warm weather of late so it’s all so lacking in goo but I have some stored up goo from the winter so I can add that in, an interesting time lapse in composting. It’s so hard to hold a phone and video so I will have to employ a child to help do the documentation.

The idea in this drawing is to explore the physicality of mark making of compost and garden debris onto paper. This is the closest I feel I can get to being inside the decomposition and death process in the act of drawing in collaboration with these materials. I feel that using the paper pulp I have made feels too much in addition to the compost itself, it looks so much like the compost itself as to lack narrative. So I am using the paper pulp and compost separately as materials in my work. Perhaps in the future I may be able to marry up the two, it feels entirely possible, just further along the road than I am currently.

The roll-ness of the paper with its clean edges and even symmetry is out of sync but at this point a necessity I am prepared to live with. Perhaps in the making of the work the edges will come apart, I sort of hope they do, but also don’t want to contrive it at this point. I will just sit quietly with the drawing and observe, participating where I feel necessary. I have three rolls of paper and I have started two of them: one in this way with the compost and the other with graphite in a more traditional drawing approach. The third is still unstarted and I am not sure how the third drawing will emerge yet.