EARTHWORK EXPERIMENTS

LATITUDE:LONGITUDE I STRANGE TREES : EPHEMERAL installation experiments 2020-

An (im)permanent installation - part of a series of five experimental environment-responsive sculptural installations created during a one-month self-directed residency at Chateau Orquevaux, France. Installed as a site-responsive ephemeral work and left to be affected by and ultimately reclaimed its’ environment.

“We’re all - trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria - pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often resolve not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.”

David G Haskell

the sentinel

Whilst on residency in early 2020, I left a silken sentinel in a forest in France
.
And in the space between my time in that wonderful dream of art and nature and hope and all that happened soon after and since then, I wrote these words….
.

My time at the chateau is now past.
My presence is a Was and not an Is.
It will fade quickly in the memory of those who remain there.
But in the forest, along a path, a few thousand stitches remain. Silk marked by some hundred hours of handwork, that carries the energy of those who have inhabited it - It remains.
A sentinel to time past and present and future. A homage to Nature. To the Millisecond. To the Forever.
She will remain and slowly decay whilst moss creeps up her skirt and insects nest in her folds, whilst dew forms and evaporates and sun rays cut through the trees and bathe her in light.
She will Remain and Decay. Her fibres will shatter and rot. The forest will consume her. Until she is nothing and everything.

The intent for this work was always that its decay would be documented but unfortunately that didn’t happen… until 121 weeks later.

Thank you to my beautiful friend, the brilliant artist Kristine Granger for walking back into the forest to find my work and photograph it so many many days after we first installed it .

the wounded

Jan 2020

It has been strange to be on the other side of the world while Australia is burning.
An over 100 year old pine grows on a small island in front of the chateau - I named her the Lightening Tree

I put my hands deep into her wounds and cry for my own.
She has survived multiple strikes
She carries the deep black charred scars of her battles
She draws a thread across sixteen thousand kilometers, stitching my broken heart back to my broken home land, we all Wounded.

+ A limited run of small-scale (8x10) fine art photographic documentation prints of this work are available to purchase via the STOCKROOM