2022 / Notes from the bog
My friend and collaborator Jasper Wrinch wrote text alongside these works. He is also apart of MULCH Collective. You can view more of his work here.
A deliberation. I’ve been watching an empty lot grow over. Stumps stand ankle deep in their own chips, and soil turned over and piled in a heap sits next to a pit that has slowly filling with water, draining away, filling and draining again. The entanglement of roots jut out from the dirt walls. Branches, once a tapestry overhead, are a mess of a pile, being creeped in and over, swallowed in an alien verdancy. These are the tendrils that form around me.
A hesitancy. To use these white hands to pluck away an invasion is to enact an irony that is not lost on me. An altering nonetheless, but away from a bind. There is a collaboration between what is wanted and what is not, this unbalanced entanglement, this uneasy exchange. Because restoration is a matter of perspective, of agency, of will, and to accept a pre-disturbed state, as if I had any right to decide.
A despair. I have been sitting with a pile of blackberry stems, knotweed thick like an arm, morning glory just plucked and still writhing, and the responsibility envelops me, pulls me into the thicket. And knowing that these are choking out a web that was always graciously entangled in its own ecology, apart from them and us. Still, to get away from that smothering that tension without stooping back into imposition is a heavy coat.
A caring. Trust is not to be presumed in a landscape touched by these traumas. It is not to be hurried, but to be held softly against the cheek. An embrace and a stewardship of a surrounding that has never asked me to be here, but welcomes a warmth that has not been long in the tooth. A comfort in being held by mosses in dappled sunlight. A papery bark peeling away from soft skin.
A patience. Digging in and around a specific root network to ensure shoots are not sent out again amidst the bracken. Unweaving and weaving again a cloth, and counting each thread. Taking note of the distance between each leaf cluster on every branch, and how each fruiting fungal body picks its tree like a partner in a dance.
A ritual. And so pulling cordage out of unused space is a way to ease the guilt, or perhaps a just a way to spend time making things no worse. Pulling use out of the shrapnel, and form a new web of those who weren’t here before. A layering of ecologies, invasives keeping invasives at bay. There is a palpable resistance, a connectivity and collaboration in a parasitic paradise. Listening in to the whispering around me, and hoping to translate that entanglement.
Beeswax, construction saftey fencing, Himalayan blackberry and bindweed cordage
NOT FOR SALE
Oil on canvas
FOR SALE
Oil on canvas
FOR SALE