Sep-Oct 19 Entanglement Embossing Trees

I've spent the last few months recalibrating after graduating, adjusting to new spaces and putting some ideas into practice.



With more time than expected over summer, I made some print work and continued that into my new working space at Eaton House. I've reduced my imitative and graphic input into the work. Instead, finds are embossed onto damp cartridge paper with an etching press - actually, it's a cheap adapted die-cutter - to transfigure three-dimensional objects onto a flatter surface. It protects some of the shapes and textures and obfuscates others in interesting ways. There will be some way of pulling someone else's gaze through this collection and giving them a view of the ground level, which won't be always something to be proud of but won't be unremittingly grim. It already suprises me in unusual ways.

 

I park in different places each day and walk into the studio with the purpose of collecting things on my way in. My gaze is mostly fixed on the ground, but my imagination is continually pulled upwards into the canopies of the trees in the parks and boulevards in this part of Coventry. Unlike the things I brought back from the new housing estates I was exploring, much of what I find in this aged suburbia South of Eaton House is organic; leaves and seeds from mature trees, windfall fruit, and berries. Sure, they are mixed in with thoughtlessly discarded plastic bits and bobs; broken blue pen lids, coffee lids, ring pulls, plastic chocolate bar wrappers and a dropped horde of Costa sugar packets. Nevertheless, I've been given a feel that there is a bounty of 'nature' on the surface. This space is settled in and ecology with the wilderness has grown - or been allowed to edge in.

The research nature of my practice means I'm drawn to preservation; to represent the items picked up as much to interpret them in some artistic sense. There is something as magical in the real fragments that we walk over, as to imagine that surface as foreign and unknowable because we overlook it (in both senses of the word.) Although we might experience it as something solid and supporting, it is at the same time very changeable and far from inert, in a chaotic as well as cyclical manner, although that often manifests in a very low-key way.

Initially, idly following a lead from the tree matter, I took a route around War Memorial Park photographing memorial plaques at the foot of trees - each beseeching a plaintive descriptive "Tree". Each plaque a rope on a cultivated foot. The immediate cultural cliche linkage of trees and plants to human bereavement and loss harnesses and overcomes the wilderness of trees. Cultivation seems to create a scene that pales in comparison with the rich and complex entanglement of wilderness. There seems an urge to arrange or make sense of things that is to the detriment of the things in question.

Understanding of the wild is really hard for us to access as a culture. In effect, these wild and culture are binary opposites, a duality that pushes us further and further away from the world that sustains us.
As we enjoy our commonplace optimum conditions of survival we become further dislocated. It is possible that if we were more mentally located within the environment that sustains us, we would treat it better. Would we, like the trees, make our waste do nothing more than enrich the ground we grow on.   

This quote (I think) is from Timothy Morton. He is writing about his theory of hyperobjects:

This is an inverted image of an unfinished pathway on one of the housing estates I explored last summer. We could go further on our path, but we have to think differently: 'imagine a mode of reading the world' in a way that is not our own, possibly not for our own benefit if we could be so capable.