I’m an artist who wants a society with a caring operating system and a planet with a future. I have developed an artistic practice using a broad range of mediums including sculpture, video art, performance, ‘happenings’, print, drawing, dialogue, natural inks and natural pigments. It’s an intersectional practice, crossing disciplines in the humanities, (history, geography, psychology & language), in the sciences, (plant biology, chemistry & physics), and in maths and technology. The heart of my practice is within the social arts, connecting with communities, and using practice-based research to create works which raise awareness and facilitate depth of engagement. The result is a versatile practice of poetic activism.
The enquiry for my body of work with inks and pigments relates to my lifelong connection with nature, and I consider myself lucky to live and to have grown up in the countryside. The uncanny time of lockdown highlighted the importance of this connection, and I started to use nature more directly in my practice. I learnt how to extract colour from plants and started on an exciting journey of discovery. Part of the awe of nature, is its’ unpredictability. Working with natural inks is a balance between the unpredictable and control and I enjoy working between the two. I don’t always know in advance what colour the plant will yield, there is no encyclopaedia, but I can control the variations the plant yields when simmering it up to extract it. This gives some order within the chaos, which, on reflection, is much needed during unpredictable times. The ‘brewing’ process is exciting; making decisions about when to stop and making detailed notes so that more informed decisions can be made at the next opportunity. The variations are what make this process so unique: the scale of the ‘yet to learn’ is unfathomable.
The awe of nature can be overwhelming through its’ vastness as per the Kantian definition of the connection with nature and the sublime. I use a ‘nano-approach’ to investigate difficult concepts at a micro level to aid understanding at a macro level. Previously I have examined time and the medium of video art using this approach, looking at moments of ‘nano-liminality’, looking at how the interstice between frames is enlarged with the slow-motion technique and comparing this to the breaking down of an atom. To make this enquiry manageable, I concentrated the research in one parish locality; where I live (through necessity due to lockdown restrictions) and on the specific natural habitat of hedgerows. I choose this habitat because I’m involved with my local climate action group, and, as one part of our ‘Green Plan’ with the local environment group, we conducted a local parish hedgerow survey. Hedges are excellent carbon sinks, have extraordinary biodiversity (2070 species have been recorded in one 85 metre stretch), and act as a thoroughfare for wildlife between habitats. A diverse team of 12 volunteers (including a geologist, a university administrator, a management accountant, a parish councillor and 3 artists), went out for a couple of hours every weekend and recorded the relevant data; how ‘wide-high-long’, what species, assess the health and noted the gaps. Based on initial data gained from existing maps, the parish has 46km of hedges and we ‘ground-truthed’ this with a view to improving their health. I then condensed this further by periodising it in seasons. Plants give different colours at different times of the year. An elder leaf for example will yield a fresh green in spring and a yellow in the summer. This has led to a current enquiry into the correlation between levels of plant chlorophyll and colour.
When I am working with a material, in this instance, hedgerow inks, I cross disciplines, so when looking at our parish hedges, I increased my knowledge of the geography of the locality, and I gained knowledge of their history. Hedges are visual documents in the landscape of political and social history. Being on the cusp of the Chilterns Hills, the hedges in our parish are a mix of species of ancient origin on the hills and in the ‘lowlands’, they are predominantly typical ‘enclosure’ hawthorn hedges of the mid 1800s which visually map the history of capitalism. I came across the curious phenomenon of Cuckoo Pens cited on Ordnance Survey Maps by word of mouth from our hedge expert, Nigel Adams, who was leading our survey. There is a folkloric myth attached to Cuckoo Pens, first documented in 1630, whereby the Merry Men of Gotham entrapped the cuckoo in trees and built a circular hedge around them so they couldn’t migrate, and the summer would never end. The myth states that they didn’t build the hedge high enough, the cuckoo got away, and the seasons continued. This idea of perpetual seasons led me to start freezing the inks to keep them fresh so that I could use the true colour of any season together simultaneously in my work and play with the natural rhythm of time. I wanted to create a work that stemmed from the idea I argued in my dissertation, Using the work, If I Hear a Loud Bang, I’ll Count to 10 Slowly Then Walk Towards It (2018) by Jules Bishop as a prism, explore how embodiment through the medium of video art affects us in the ‘now’, that, by feeling time differently, embodied responses could bring about new ways of thinking regarding climate change. Environmental activism is a driving force in my practice and by marrying different disciplines into it, I give it this poetic touch, the resonance and the reverberations of which have the potential to be louder and to go on for longer.
Freezing the inks also led me down an enquiry into contemporary drawing practice in the expanded field. By definition, inks and watercolours (which can have the same gum Arabic binder) are differentiated by the state of the particles; watercolours are always made from solid pigment particles which are insoluble in water and inks are in liquid form and are soluble with or without a binder. Based upon one of my key principles, zero-waste, I used an iterative approach to the tests I performed. For example, I found that the ink was more concentrated in the residue left by the ice-cubes in the tray, and I used these residues to create mono and chine-collé prints. The use of Japanese paper for this process led to my first experiments using the frozen inks with Japanese papers and different substrates underneath. I tested extensively and created a series of ‘ice process-drawings’, where ink ices are left to melt and make their own marks. They melt on the top and also seep through in between the two layers of paper. The Japanese paper in turn absorbs ink from the top and from underneath, creating unique works. I likened this to the same way in which hedges absorb carbon: both from over and under-ground. I see my role in the process as one of a facilitator who steers and intervenes when necessary, using my body and intuition to direct the watery inks to stay on the page. The ice-process drawings are performance pieces. Fascinating and mindful to observe as they draw themselves, it is also engaging to watch how they evolve as they dry. They are living drawings, and they also change as they mature. The ephemeral quality of natural colour can be embraced and enjoyed now that it has become so easy to digitally document their journeys.
My body was the inspiration for the Rubia Tinctorum series of drawings. Undergoing hormonal changes, I was using different replacement hormone drugs to remain in equilibrium and started experimenting with modifiers with the inks. Simultaneously adding more equilibrium with my ink making plants too, I started creating inks and pigments with stable, well-documented historical dye plants such as madder, coreopsis, and weld, while also embarking on relandscaping the garden as a self-sufficient ink and paint garden. This series was created using iron oak gall ink from the hedgerow, madder from the garden, and gorse from the road verge. They were subsequently altered with the main natural colour modifiers, soda ash, alum and citric acid. Alongside their environmental benefits and their ephemerality, you can drastically change the colour of inks and pigments by altering their pH levels which puts them definitely in the spectrum of the sublime.
‘Gluons’ are what binds particles together. The ‘gluon’ that binds my works into a practice is the process of embodiment. I use it in performance, embodying sensation, in the creation of process-drawings, embodying intuition as a means of facilitation, in the making of materials, embodying a sense of place which has loud local resonance, and by putting social art at the heart of my practice, embodying life and practice in one. Where the boundary lies between my life and my art is hard to distinguish and define. They fuse, merge and intertwine. I walk up and down hedges foraging at the weekends, which is part of my ‘everyday’ life but it’s how I use the knowledge and connection gained to spark dialogue, to raise awareness and to deepen engagement that makes it different. My practice an extension of key principles I live by: take all single-use plastics out of the system and don’t produce any more; stop using fossil-fuels and don’t extract any more; and zero-waste: reuse, recycle, repurpose, rethink, reimagine….
I have sought inspiration from contemporary artist, Neville Gabie. His Cambridge Community Collection was an unfinished work which was based on creating a unique archive of UK registered apple trees by grafting 800 species of apple tree and planting them, in alphabetical order, in concentric circles around a centre-point in the city. These would indicate your location relative to the city centre and, at the same time, map routes to new developments in the south of the city and highlight the ‘same symbiotic and mutually dependent relationship between existing and new communities which need to be fed, nurtured and established.’ The community footprint of Gabie’s work gives it the rhythm of a choir. Sculptor and land artist, Andy Goldsworthy directly influenced this body of work, with his Snowball Drawings melting on paper in the middle of the City of London. I have benefitted from the expert knowledge of colour practitioners from all over the world such as Natalie Stopka, Catalina Christensen, Annie Hogg, and Caroline Ross, as well as groups Pigments Revealed International in the US and Plants & Colour in the UK. I also find ‘grooves of affinity’ with artists such as Linda Gass, who interprets climate data, and @a.ruralpen who buys up guns in America from pawnbrokers and turns them into ink and paint. As well as highlighting the importance of nature, lockdown also highlighted the importance of community. In 1992, theorist Suzi Gablik wrote, ‘the new connective aesthetics recognizes that we live in a time in which our need for community has become critical. Many artists now fashion their individuality out of this interconnection and weave it directly into their work. Over the next few decades, I think we will see more art that is essentially social, that rejects the myths of neutrality and autonomy, as the notion of atomic individuals discreetly divided from each other gives way, within an ecological paradigm, to a different notion of the self.’1
My practice is a response to this, 32 years on.
- Gablik, Suzi. “Connective Aesthetics.” American Art, vol. 6, no. 2, 1992, pp. 2–7. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3109088. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021.