Statement
My current installation and sculptural based practice explores how parts of the natural world become ‘monuments’ in our lives, and how memories can be re-experienced. The work is experimental and incorporated material processes that establish connections that give form to a narrative of space and history. The cyanotype process allows me to record and re-imagine sites, using accumulated materials and photography collected at specific locations. The work bridges my feelings of disconnection through an exploration of sites that I have grown up around in Newcastle and Northumberland. Trees are my monuments, they are witness to the connections between people and these places, becoming subject of my imagery. Cyanotypes translate these through deep blue hues, producing ephemeral and obscured images. Printing on fabric allows for a malleable and changing form, alongside the fading tones and gradients. This inherent fragility in the process has become integral to my practice. Knotting, draping and tying fabric together is important to an act of storytelling and symbolic gesture of attachment. This communicates a ritual of connectivity, in which I engage with the materials. The sites are not recreated, but captured through my own perception, creating a semi-permanent memorialisation. Here I explore my own proximity to the environment as well as how public natural spaces hold shared moments in communities.
There is a purposeful choice of using environmentally conscious printing methods to acknowledge the techniques historic connections with nature.[1] Early prints with varied materials and exposure times (cyanotype studies/anthotypes) produced inconsistent outcomes; relevant in their transient quality and impression of what is left behind. Textile cyanotypes using negatives of photographs taken at sites, produced prints of a richer quality and texture where the solution would pool together in areas and fade in others. A less conformed way of making allowed me to work on a larger scale.
For ‘A lieu de mémoire’ (2024) I was not limited by the interiority of the studio, and could push boundaries of presence. The work does not compete in size with the subject, but attempts to test potential limits of the gallery whilst maintaining monumentality and relationship to the site. The work explored ecological places of memory to confront the concepts of ‘national monuments’ by the philosopher Pierre Nora, who states there are “lieux de memoire’, sites of memory, because there are no longer real environments of memory”.[2]
The work occupies space so that there is an encounter with the artwork, how we experience the work situated in the space is vital to fostering interaction with sites histories. Producing larger scale work ‘Close to home’ highlighted the importance of height in presentation, but felt linear when sewn together. The process of making ‘Sycamore Gap..’, changed to become a more spirited play of mediums, with greater focus on presentation that disrupts interior space.
Using theories of ‘monumentalising nature as an autonomous sphere of existence’,[3] my work developed as an ongoing process in which material can have different facets, and acts more in the physical reality of the environment. Key references in my research include artists such as Richard Long,[4] by engaging with sites to collect materials (both physical and photographic) to be used in new assemblages. Encountering exhibitions such as ‘Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art’[5] and El Anatsui’s ‘Behind the red moon’,[6] have informed my practice to explore ways of hanging and manipulating textile works to create more dynamic outcomes. I studied the way land and environment artists have imagined land as a metaphor, to preserve narratives and reflect society (William Furlong; Mark Dion),[7] as well as how they integrate with the environment by way of performance or displacement of materials (Ana Mendieta; Robert Smithson).[8] Smithson’s sculptural work specifically addresses our relationship with monuments, and conceptualises the ‘non-site’ of the gallery and landscape as coextensive.
My practice resonated with this dialectical thinking where “the ‘site’ was ‘the physical, raw reality’ of a location while the ‘non-site’ was a sample of that reality displayed elsewhere”.[9] Installing some works both in the gallery and the site I engage in cyclical process of making, that allows the work to adapt and explore whether it can exist in two ‘realms’.
My work has progressed by way of combining materials sculpturally to create a more expanded installation with more intricate elements. Greater exaggeration of materials plays a role of stimulating a deeper engagement with the work. The final degree show exhibition is now less focused on one specific site, rather creating a new site centred around a sculpturally sensory form. Here materials are taken from multiple locations to make a new work whereby the finished piece is a remnant of the processes undertaken.
[1] Anna Atkins, Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns (Read Books Ltd, 2023).
[2] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations (University of California Press, 1989), http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928520.
[3] Demos, T. J. “The Politics of Sustainability: Contemporary Art and Ecology.” In Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3417.
[4] Richard Long, Red Slate Circle, 1988, Slate, 1988, Tate.
[5] Barbican, Unravel:The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, 2024, Textile Exhibition , 2024.
[6] El Anatsui, Behind the Red Moon, October 2023, Sculptural Installation , October 2023, Tate Modern.
[7] Jeffrey Kastner, Land Und Environmental Art (Berlin: Phaidon, 2004).
[8] Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series , 1974, 1974.
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, April 1970, Earth, Mud, April 1970.
[9] Robert Smithson, Interview with Avalanche, 1970.