Library of Litter
Coventry ArtSpace Arcadia Gallery 26/1-7/2 2021
Marking the end of my year long graduate artist-in-residence at Coventry ArtSpace Library of Litter took place during the the winter Covid19 lockdown requiring engaging a local audience in Coventry who expressed a pressing need for new visual culture but couldn't access the space. The exhibition became accessible on different levels, as a window exhibition, as augmented reality, as a website and as a soundwalk featuring poems inspired by my encounters with other lives in Coventry's ecosystem, available in Coventry parks long after the exhibition.
Soundwalk: Link to Library of Litter Website
I set myself the task of trying to ascertain the soul of Coventry via what I found on the ground. My resulting collection of human and botanic detritus became a set of icons, by which I came to understand land as an amalgamation of living things, with every being connecting to the ground and the environment in multiple ways.
Library of Litter reconstitutes this body of work as sculptural documentation, and reorganisation of layered references within my finds, which are to me, as a library is; a flexible body of made of parts which can be read, revisited, withdrawn, reorganised and put back. Their meaning is deeply bound to external reference but is at the same time loosened (they are just objects, they are just books) from those references, and dangerous in their state as forgotten things.
I began to think of litter as a bit like body parts; parts of selves are dropped and become part of a communal whole. The parts though remain themselves and carry meaning from their former lives, but now exist in a different phase. When the objects dropped biodegrade this cycle works, as with the botanic objects of leaves and seeds, etc. However, modern human litter often takes too long to biodegrade to be useful to a circular ecology that uses the action of littering to feed new life, instead it causes great damage.
Through thinking about litter I came to understand that we all drop things, that this is part of the organism we are, and that we share this activity with other organisms even though our connection with the ground has stopped working so well.
A early thread of my research revolved around the shape of Knopper Wasp oak galls which I found in abundance on the ground in Coventry's parks. I used these as a focus to make sculptural research about inter-related species lifecycles and how DNA and environments are altered by parasitism. This work became Polygalls. By the time the solo show rolled round, this research had begun to meld functionally with my later thinking, as pushpins made with cast-resin gall interiors which were integrated into End Papers and Thing Blindness.
Marking the end of my year long graduate artist-in-residence at Coventry ArtSpace Library of Litter took place during the the winter Covid19 lockdown requiring engaging a local audience in Coventry who expressed a pressing need for new visual culture but couldn't access the space. The exhibition became accessible on different levels, as a window exhibition, as augmented reality, as a website and as a soundwalk featuring poems inspired by my encounters with other lives in Coventry's ecosystem, available in Coventry parks long after the exhibition.
Soundwalk: Link to Library of Litter Website
I set myself the task of trying to ascertain the soul of Coventry via what I found on the ground. My resulting collection of human and botanic detritus became a set of icons, by which I came to understand land as an amalgamation of living things, with every being connecting to the ground and the environment in multiple ways.
Library of Litter reconstitutes this body of work as sculptural documentation, and reorganisation of layered references within my finds, which are to me, as a library is; a flexible body of made of parts which can be read, revisited, withdrawn, reorganised and put back. Their meaning is deeply bound to external reference but is at the same time loosened (they are just objects, they are just books) from those references, and dangerous in their state as forgotten things.
I began to think of litter as a bit like body parts; parts of selves are dropped and become part of a communal whole. The parts though remain themselves and carry meaning from their former lives, but now exist in a different phase. When the objects dropped biodegrade this cycle works, as with the botanic objects of leaves and seeds, etc. However, modern human litter often takes too long to biodegrade to be useful to a circular ecology that uses the action of littering to feed new life, instead it causes great damage.
Through thinking about litter I came to understand that we all drop things, that this is part of the organism we are, and that we share this activity with other organisms even though our connection with the ground has stopped working so well.
A early thread of my research revolved around the shape of Knopper Wasp oak galls which I found in abundance on the ground in Coventry's parks. I used these as a focus to make sculptural research about inter-related species lifecycles and how DNA and environments are altered by parasitism. This work became Polygalls. By the time the solo show rolled round, this research had begun to meld functionally with my later thinking, as pushpins made with cast-resin gall interiors which were integrated into End Papers and Thing Blindness.
