'Grass Roots' at Redwing Gallery - March 2017
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Couch grass crops up in conversation more than any other plant at the allotment site where I am a tenant. People wage war on it with spades, rotavators, poisons, flame-throwers and suppressive materials and yet I haven’t met anyone who has successfully eradicated it from their plot as its rhizomatic progress is encouraged by disturbance. ‘Grass Roots’ is an exhibition of the work I made in my studio alongside working my allotment and walking with my dog, Olive. Two questions I continually ask myself…
‘How can art as a process emphasise what is overlooked in day-to-day life?’
‘How can interactions in day-to-day life engender becoming?’
I experiment with observations I make of nature’s methods rather than trying to represent the natural world and as such my processes and materials are a response to the wonderful ordinariness of day-to-day life. For example, I began my day for six months writing and painting a day-to-day phrase, with coloured ink, onto strips of leftover canvas. I cut out the spaces left at the edges, immersed these in the relevant coloured paint and dropped them onto canvas where they found their own shape and became part of a subsequent painting. The leftover phrase strips served to ward birds off seedlings at my allotment. Elements, in the form of objects and gestures from my allotment infiltrate my studio and vice versa. I sometimes deliberately push a painting beyond its usual limits to see what may be possible in the hope of surprising myself…
… As for couch grass, despised and rejected by most, it becomes for me a symbol of hope and a metaphor for survival.
‘How can art as a process emphasise what is overlooked in day-to-day life?’
‘How can interactions in day-to-day life engender becoming?’
I experiment with observations I make of nature’s methods rather than trying to represent the natural world and as such my processes and materials are a response to the wonderful ordinariness of day-to-day life. For example, I began my day for six months writing and painting a day-to-day phrase, with coloured ink, onto strips of leftover canvas. I cut out the spaces left at the edges, immersed these in the relevant coloured paint and dropped them onto canvas where they found their own shape and became part of a subsequent painting. The leftover phrase strips served to ward birds off seedlings at my allotment. Elements, in the form of objects and gestures from my allotment infiltrate my studio and vice versa. I sometimes deliberately push a painting beyond its usual limits to see what may be possible in the hope of surprising myself…
… As for couch grass, despised and rejected by most, it becomes for me a symbol of hope and a metaphor for survival.
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