Taking the Garden As It Could Be
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0. INTRODUCTION: My Journey Since Bargehouse
0.1 Bargehouse
0.2 Object Collection In Southern Spain
0.3 Experimenting with Site-Specific Art
1. SPACE
1.1 'Interzone' as a Way to Situate
1.2 Provisioning Space
1.3 The Political Garden
2. MATERIALITY
1.1 Sensations: Reflecting on Bodily Landscape Practice
1.2 Inadvertent Vs. Overt Imbedding of Objects
1.3 Processing Materials
3. CONCLUSION
Consolidated Bibliography
Introduction: My Journey Since Bargehouse
0.1 Bargehouse
After the Bargehouse Exhibition, Spectrum: Diffusion (April 28-30, 2023) at the Oxotower, I received feedback on my work that left me quite emotionally distraught about my capacity to produce artwork professionally for a living. In particular, I was getting a lot of criticism about Show Me Endangerment, It is Alleged (2023), the first painting I produced on the MA.
"Show Me Endangerment, It is Alleged" (2023) installed at the Bargehouse Exhibition
To rewind to a few weeks before the exhibition, and why I made the painting in the first place, I had been feeling spread thin psychologically: I had spent the first 4-5 months of MA Drawing experimenting with sculpting in the foundry and learning how to make lithographs, but was finding that while I was gaining technical skills, I was not developing my research in a way that spoke to my actual interests, or at least, that I was not communicating my research interests well through my work. After much contemplation, I thought it may be worth returning to my painting practice (prior to 2022, my portfolio consisted entirely of paintings), to a medium where I had felt like I had developed a voice and political critique. So, for Bargehouse, I worked on bright yellow, stretched linen, and used a combination of acrylic, ink, charcoal, and pastel on the surface. I purposefully worked on this painting at home—as Sarah Woodfine said to me this October 2023, it is courageous to work on something new and unresolved in the shared/public studio setting. I certainly was not ready to share my reinitiating into painting with my tutors or peers.
Show Me Endangerment, It is Alleged was based on my Armenian Cochineal research and the breed of cacti that they siphon nutrients from; in the broader scope, the painting registered my ongoing interest in my Armenian heritage, my great grandparents being genocide survivors, and the current events conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the indigenously Armenian land, Artsakh* (as of this October 2023, Artsakh has been seized by Azerbaijan and driven 120,000 Armenian people out as refugees).
*Artsakh is referred to as Nagorno Karabakh by Azerbaijan and in the news.
By painting at home in preparation for the Bargehouse exhibition, I was relieved to remove myself from university feedback and the anxiety inherent to reinventing one's practice on a fine arts postgraduate degree. However, Mujeeb Bhatti and Kate Terry, who gave me critiques after the show, felt that I had become lost in my return to painting. Kate referenced my earlier work on the course (a series of teeth-like plaster molds) as a foil to my current painting. She critiqued that the representational work I was starting to develop now was fumbling to communicate the ancestral and horticultural topics that I thought I was tackling. As Mujeeb put it: there may be a problem if there is a difference between what the audience is registering in the work, and the conceptual intentions of the artist. Representational work, in the way I was doing it, was not registering as I intended.
In the Fall of 2021, as I was finishing my final year of my undergraduate degree in philosophy, it was an incredibly relief to make the move from planning to attend law school to become a philosophy academic, to deciding that I would pursue fine art. But after the feedback from Bargehouse—which after much reflection, I agreed was incredibly spot on—I felt intense self-doubt about my decision to become an artist. In retrospect, I think I returned to painting as a place of safety, when I needed to be willing to develop in a new direction that was responsive to my growth as a graduate student.
In the midst of receiving feedback, I needed to go home to deal with a family emergency, and found myself digesting the painting and the scattered state of my practice from Boston, Massachusetts. At the root of it, the negative reception of my painting did not bother me as much as the fact that I had yet to make anything on the course that I really felt good about. It took me a few weeks of contemplation, and a site trip to the Tabernas Desert in Spain (where I actually looked at the Cochineals, cacti, and sand I had been researching), to finally realize how I was going to pivot and move forward.
0.2 Object Collection in Southern Spain
The trip to Spain happened under unusual circumstances—I had yet to travel since coming to the UK, wanting to prioritize my university work, but found myself very unstimulated by the rain and grey of London. In my dreams, I kept thinking about my previous camping trips to New Mexico and Arizona, so I researched "deserts in Europe" on my search engine. Almeria and the Tabernas desert, as I would have it, would not only allow me to see and smell sand, but study Opuntia Indica-Ficus cacti and cochineal beetles native to the region. My cousin Maddie, who is my age, works at a travel agency, and said she would join me and get us free bookings for the whole stay. If anything, I thought it would be a great way to 'get out of the city' and clear my head.
At 8am after we landed in Almeria, we immediately drove to the Tabernas desert where I thought we would find Opuntia Indica-Ficus cacti, and hopefully, some cochineal beetles living on them. Instead, we ended up in a commercialized spaghetti western town where I found one Opuntia in their cactus farm, and not a single Opuntia during our multi-hour hike through the Tabernas desert. I was very ready to give up, but Maddie, who I think knew how important this trip may be to getting me back on track, helped me research where in the neighboring towns we may be able to find Opuntias.
Tabernas Desert hike
Ultimately, we drove an hour and a half to the Cabo de Gala-Nijar Natural Park, where our research indicated that we would find acres of retired cochineal farms used until the late 20th century to harvest pigment. Thousands of Opuntias used to be propagated for the soul purpose of providing nutrients to the cochineals which were then swept off the cacti's surface to be processes and turned into a powder red.
But after hiking for two hours in the park, we still could not find a single living or dead Opuntia. I took some 3D scans of the landscape using Metascanner, but largely felt that the trip was unsuccessful.
Although it was 7pm at this point, and we were a 2.5 hour drive from where we were staying, Maddie insisted that we continue to drive around to find Opuntias. She argued that it would be ridiculous for us to not find the plants I had come to see. So I reasoned that it would be best drive around the agricultural
Cabo de Gala-Nijar Natural Park trail
areas near us, and see if any farm remnants could be found. We drove north, slowly scanning the side of the road.
Somewhere between Cabo de Gata and San Isidro de Nijar, we found exactly what we were looking for wedged between two contemporary agricultural practices: a group of living and dead Opuntias, most likely left uncleared from a previous farming practice. And consistent with my reading, many of them were infected with cochineal beetles, identifiable by the white, cottony fluff they covered themselves as protection from extreme heat. According to The Encyclopedia of Cacti by Cullmann, Grotz, and Groner, the best way to re-propagate opuntia cacti is to slice off a node, let the open cut dry, and replant it in sand/ grout mixture. I took clippings from the partially dead Opuntias (which had skeletal bottoms, but hydrated, living nodes towards to top, some infected with cochineals and some not). I also collected the intriguing skeletons of dead Opuntias.
Top left: Partially living Opuntias from retired Cochineal farm; Top Right: Entire skeleton from dead Opuntia; Bottom left: Skeletal node from Opuntia, collected and brought home to London; Bottom Right: Cochineal beetles living on Opuntia node
The adventure itself, the landscape materials that I documented and collected along the way, and the satisfaction of finally finding the plant and animal that I was researching, lent itself to an incredibly enriching trip, only further enhanced by the fact that I took this research trip with a family member who shares my Armenian heritage. Reflecting back on the experience, a few aspects made it artistically successful: 1) the object collection (dirt, cacti, beetles, rocks), 2) the unplanned and winding exploration of the landscape, and 3) the circuitous relationship that my Armenian heritage shares with Spanish beetles (them being the sister beetles to the Armenian beetles). The intense physicality of the hikes and mission-like endeavor forced me to recontextualize the failures of Show Me Endangerment, It is Alleged. Rather than depicting what I studied, I needed to find a process that embodied what I studied.
Map of Southern Spain. Travel on my first day there, and my journey to the retired Cochineal farm, depicted in Red.
0. 3 Experimenting with Site-Specific Work
The Spain trip pushed me to consider that I needed to be working in the outdoors, responsive to the whims of the landscape. In fact, in the back garden of my temporary housing, the first experiment I conducted on the MA was to dig a small hole, then splash hot wax into the hole to make a casted imprint. Returning to my
Digging a hole in the garden at my temporary housing in Stockwell. October 2022.
material interest in using the ground as a mold that naturally releases whatever is cast into it, my instinct was to try something similar at my flat in Brockley, UK.
I cleared the 8 x 20 foot garden bed, overrun with 4 foot weeds, and just began digging. I dug until I found a large rectangular rock. It took a while, with my bare hands, to remove this rock from the ground. Before I began casting, I decided to place the rock back into the center on the hole as an 'artifact' of my 'archeological' dig.
When I was done digging the hole and arranging my rock, I was very satisfied with the form that resulted: it documented my finger marks and labor, respected the objects that were hidden below the surface, and expressed a raw primal energy in its construction.
First large hole experiment, with imbedded rectangular rock, in Brockley garden bed, May 2023.
After the ground was prepared, my process was as follows:
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Prepare the center rectangular stone with vaseline release agent.
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Place wooden planks around the hole like a frame.
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Split the hole in two with more planks and stones.
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Prepare plaster and pour it into the first half of the hole, making sure to achieve 1.5 inches in plaster thickness and being careful to pour all the way to the edges of the wooden frame.
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Repeat step 4 with the second half of the hole.
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Wait 1-2 days for the plaster to fully cure.
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Remove the plaster cast by peeling back wooden planks, and digging underneath the plaster until the cast comes loose.
In the process of Step 7, where I am removing the second half of the plaster cast by loosening the soil underneath with a pitchfork.
I would come to repeat versions of this process two more times for the Camberwell MA Summer degree show.
In this section, I have tried to establish my journey from Bargehouse to my first landscape cast, and my willingness (winding though it was) to put my painting style aside in favor of a mixed-media landscape practice that centers around my process and location. In the following sections, SPACE and MATERIALITY, I will regularly interweave my analysis of both of these concepts with more narrative on how my landscape work has continued to narrow and crystalize since last Spring 2023.
1. SPACE
1.1 'Interzone' as a Way to Situate
In September 2023, I applied for a group exhibition, titled Interzone, to be hosted at Peckham Levels. The following is an excerpt from the open call, published by Jacob Clayton:
Taken from William Burrough’s novel ‘Naked Lunch’ (1959), ‘Interzone’ represents a fictional de- parture from the safety of the parameters of reality, a physical place one may pass through, where the ecstasies and atrocities of heaven and hell are escalated through the highs and lows of the spectrum of human emotion and experience. Deriving from ‘international zone’, ‘Interzone’ exists as a Tangiers-esk setting in which we encounter customs exemptions and administrative grey are- as. It is a place of vague policy and ambiguous law. This is a place where all sensitivities become acute, like an infected tooth. Opened to freedom and corruption it is both a sanctuary and a cell. Allegorically, Interzone is internal space, multi-dimensional and non-Euclidean, given our full ob- jective attention. ‘Interzone’ is also the title of a long-running British Science-Fiction magazine first published in 1982, publishing the work of authors such as William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, and Terry Pratchett.
This show focuses on such internal space and how it may be visually manifested, be it guarded or open, of the mind or the body. This space may be a fortress, an open expanse, a portal, a tomb, a site of resurrection, a chamber, a nest, a ziggurat, a container, or a black hole. It may look to the future or to the past, but It, itself, whatever it is, is the manifestation of the present.
I am looking for creative approaches to how this internal space may be visualised/ navigated. I am particularly interested in our visualisations of protection and ascension, and how esoteric knowl- edges, theologies, and spiritualities weave through these spaces.
Instead of offering up a proposal for resolved or new work for the show, I submitted the following short text, detailing an interpretation 'interzone' which relates to my critical reflection on London's space constraints and to my practice:
Thoughts on “interzone” in London:
When you look at an onion under a microscope, you uncover cell organelles in a flurry of constant motion. In other words, by re-engineering the way we look at a solid vegetable, an entire new space appears to be generated. To me, “interzone” encompasses this idea, where you take a seemingly understood space, and find a way to reveal a space between spaces through altering your perspective (psychologically or physically). In turn, this new, secret place is rife with opportunity for unusual freedom and play.
After living in London for a year, my commentary on the city has become hilariously one- note: we are slaves to a terrible, terrible, economy of space. In the midst of a housing crisis, living spaces are small and expensive. As an artist, the staggering effects of this economy triples: we have to think about renting studio space, finding places to store our artwork, and move our works done at a moments notice when our spaces fail us, flooding or getting shut down. The expense of these ridiculously small spaces only adds to the feeling that the walls are coming in on us. The image of The Maze Runner’s young Dylan O’Brien, trying to run towards an open field while 100-foot walls close in on him, comes to mind.
So, the ability to generate space, or ‘interzone,’ between contracting walls is an incredibly valuable asset to the London artist.
Last Spring, I traveled to Margate, dragging massive plaster casts across stretches of beach and stuffing them into a zip car. The effort was too heroic and largely unsuccessful, because it clumsily, without enough resourcing, tried to escape the space constraints of London, rather than address them. In hindsight, working in Margate made me realize that being a London-based artist only makes sense for me if I attempt to work within and battle against its walls. For instance, the home garden is engineered as reprieve from London’s claustrophobia, a quiet and clever architectural interzone. You can see the tension between the tightly packed gardens in the backs of London apartment, and the slow, careful, thoughtfulness with which each garden allows the Londoner to build physical freedom within the city.
So to make my GARDEN CRATER series, I dug iterations of the same hole in a plot in my garden, casting each iteration in plaster. In addition to the reprieve of the garden, my interzone was the psychological shift induced by hole-digging. I could spend an entire dissertation unpacking the altered states people find through hole digging, but I reference the following ‘mood board’ instead:
1) The Masculine Urge to Dig a Tunnel: An Investigation by Annie Rauwerda*
*note: I think that calling hole digging a “masculine urge” is problematic, but the contemporary preoccupation with this subject is interesting to investigate as a cultural phenomena.
Proposal
2) “Digging Deeper in the Archaeological Psyche” by Campell & Leiper 2013. 3) The Chauvet Cave and vision quests
Conceptually, I am still sorting out what the next phase of my work will look like over the coming month. But undoubtedly, my desire for scale and power in my artwork begs me to develop interzones where I can.
Writing in response to the Interzone open call was my first written distillation of my observation of London's economy of space. For one, it voiced by commitment to working within the city's constraints rather than escaping them.
In contrast, I look at someone like Anselm Kiefer, who tackles the landscape with no regard for constraints. In my opinion, the scale of his work afforded by his access to massive goods and studio warehouses are excessive rather than powerful. In this way, I felt that his last and largest work, Phall If You But Will, Rise You Must installed at the "Finnegan's Wake" exhibition at White Cube (Bermondsey) is so large that it felt concerning to me, rather than provocative.
In "The Week in Art" podcast by The Art Newspaper, art critique Louisa Buck asked Keifer about the scale of his work for his 2019 White Cube exhibition, "Superstrings, Runes, The Norns, Gordian Knot":
Buck: And the scale of your work is always colossal, and in these works absolutely so. I mean, there is one work, the "Ramanujan Summation" which fills up an entire room. And scale seems to be a very crucial part for you to draw in the viewer.
Kiefer: You know, scale has nothing to do with quality. Nothing. No, the scale has not so much importance. It's more a physical thing, you know, I'm physical. I'm dancing in front of the painting.
Phall If You But Will, Rise You Must. Picture taken when I visited "Finnegan's wake in July 2023.
It is perhaps a little overly critical to take every word said in a casual interview as reflecting the true thoughts of an artist, but I was unsurprised to hear Kiefer say that "scale has not so much importance." My more cynical, if reductive view of male artists, especially those who have become prominent, is that sometimes their privilege within the art world (recognition, sales etc.) allows them to ignore the economy of space that plagues the 20th/21st century. Kiefer, in his interview, seems to more or less takes the scale of his work for granted. I do recognize that Kiefer has worked incredibly hard to have the resources he has at his disposal now, but I argue that that does not permit him to work at such can excessive scale without intention. Matty Emery on MA Printmaking sent me a video excerpt of Kiefer biking around one of his art studios. The sight of entire buildings inside this warehouse cause unease, which Emery likened to "an Amazon warehouse." To my shock, this is only a small but of Keifer's 200 acre art studio compound in Southern France.
"Imagine: Anselm Kiefer - Remembering The Future"
1.2 Provisioning Space
In 1961, Ana Mendieta was forced to immigrate from the US to Cuba under this covert operation called Operation Peter Pan, an unusual collaboration between the US government and Cuban Christian churches in order to safely extract children living under Fidel Castro from Cuba. She was brought to the states when she was 12 years old with her sister, and they bounced between housing situation and foster homes for six years before they were reunited with their mother and later their brother. In an interview, Mendieta discusses this early adolescent experience as a divorcement from the environment. In her own words, she explained, “I have been carrying on a dialogue between the landscape in the female body (based on my own silhouette). I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). I’ve become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.”
The quote gets at Mendieta’s intuitive need to directly interact with the landscape and mix natural materials with her own body, in order to reconnect what has been disconnected by violent political force. Many of her works are literal displacements of her body, showcasing, a negative imprint of her silhouette.
In discussion with a sculpture professor during a portfolio review for my MFA applications for next year, I was asked whether, given a bunch of money, I would still work in the garden. At the time, my instinctual answer was no, but I told her that I would give more thought as to why that was absolutely the case. Now, I look at Mendieta as serving as a powerful example of an artist who finds boundless expression in necessity. Perhaps she feels she has to work in the earth to reconnect after a forced separation from family and homeland, but regardless of whether it is absolutely 'necessary' that she work with earth rather than other mixed-media forms is an irrelevant consideration. Mendieta, as she continued to gain recognition in New York, was described in her documentary as continuing to feel trapped when she worked in the city—she diagnosed for herself that certain natural environments and freer spaces brought out the best in her work, and continued to work with trees until right up to before her death.
More broadly, many artists and even movements of artists find a mode of expression out of challenge, but stay there to build up a relationship with this process, because they find it is intentionally disrupting a politic or culture. In my Tertulia lecture, I reference the Arte Povera movement, which literally translates to "poor art." The Tate elucidates that “the term was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. When referring to arte povera, Celant wasn’t really talking about a lack of money, but rather about making art without the restraints of traditional practices and materials….Arte povera emerged from within a network of urban cultural activity in these cities as Italy was seized by economic instability.” In this quote, the Tate is explaining that yes, there was probably and lack of money in Italy at the time and artists were probably happy to save this money by not buying traditional materials, but the Arte Povera movement was motivated by political expression, not a poverty of option. In answer to the Chicago Professor's question, I think that my initial concerns around space constraint, homesickness for the outdoors, and primal urges as a maker pushed me into the garden, but that its incredible fit as a mode of expression keeps me there, over half a year after I started GARDEN CRATERS.
1.3 The Political Garden
I have no doubt, of course, that my artwork and spaces I use will change over time. Even now, my notion of what counts as "my garden" has greatly expanded. For instance, on my residency in Maine, the mudflats behind my house and the field in front of my making-space at Woodenboat acted as an approximate of the garden. The aspects that those locations share with my conventional garden in Brockley include 1) their immediacy to the spaces I occupied, 2) due to that immediacy, my heightened observation of its environmental materiality, and 3) my urge to respond to those observations. At this point in time, I feel that any proximate space that I can harness as both material reservoir and studio, and respond to can be "garden."
In a talk given eight years ago at my high school, Jamaica Kincaid, a famous American novelist and writer, said—with as much emphasis as she could—that, "The Garden. Is Always. Political." She discussed the history of gardening, from the colonial plants growing in Antigua (her home country) to cotton grower slaves in the South, and how that history cannot be evaded every time we go to work in the earth and cultivate things. In an interview, she walks around her extensive garden in Vermont, chuckling at people's shock that she 'grows cotton for fun.' As I understand it, I agree with Kincaid that there is no way to grow outside of a political framework.
Using Kincaid as philosophical influence, I find that my own mark making in my garden is a ready engagement with the political. Although I do not explicitly assert commentary about feminism or race in blurbs of my work, my existence in a colored female body is immediately, politically contextualized when an audience watches videos of me digging. At its core, it is my feeling that "respectable" women are not normative diggers: only those who are crazy (Alice in Wonderland, the "hysterical" woman with postpartum depression in The Yellow Wallpaper); disenfranchised; or hiding things; have reasons to dig and claw at the dirt.
After intense self-doubt, homesickness, and discomfort in a new country, I feel the truth of my commitment to the garden, as displayed in GARDEN CRATERS at the Camberwell MA Summer Degree Show 2023. Gardens hold within them important political context, and I sign post the audience's attention to this context by placing "garden" in the title. Similarly, "Crater" serves as a personal reference to my home. Since I was young and my parents took me for the first time, I have returned to Western Massachusetts' Mass MoCA countless times with different friends, family, and partners to show them my artistic home in their sculpture warehouses. In particular, my pilgrimages for the James Turrell works— MASS MoCA has the largest collection of his installations in the country, and extensive models of his largest work in progress, Roden Crater in Northern Arizona, USA. Over the course of my life, I have watched his C.A.V.U artwork begin, and finally reach completion last year in a refurbished water tank at MASS MoCA; and as long as I have been alive, I have tracked the progress of Roden Crater, set to be completed next year, 50 years after Turrell began the project.
In GARDEN CRATERS, the development and redevelopment of subsequent hole molds and their casts parallel my long existing dialogue with the creation of Roden Crater, where Turrell has worked with a team for remove over a million cubic yards of earth. Partly informed by my dissonant perspective of living in the UK as a mixed-raced American, my reference to Turrell's work is touchstone to home.
Myself with GARDEN CRATER 1.
2. Materiality
While I try my best to practice safety in my sculpting, I regularly forgo gloves and shoes when I work in the landscape so that I can satisfactorily feel and manipulate materials. For instance, the natural oils on and bounciness of my finger pads allow me to spread, smooth, and mark make on plaster. By contrast, wearing plastic gloves feels clumsy, leaving the gloves caked in hardened plaster so that I have to switch them out often. I also make plaster paste with uncovered hands so that I can feel out and remove lumps in the mixture. In other cases, my need to make direct contact between materials and my skin goes beyond practical necessity; covering the skin results in a loss of sensation. I cannot examine materiality and sculpt in a responsive way to the landscape if I place barriers between it and myself.
This year, I have dealt with barnacle cuts on and coral spores in my feet (pictured right) while researching and making. I've struggled with cacti glochids (their micro-fiber thorns) and plaster shards under my nail beds and on my hands. And while making OCEAN CRATER, blood blisters and plastic rope fibers imbedded on my fingertips and small lesions covered my arms. I find that these small tokens, uncomfortable as they can be, blur the distinction between body and earth— at the extreme end of this, you could become like the oceanic villain, Davey Jones, in the Pirates of the Caribbean (pictured left). The more I work with the landscape subject, the less I bother thinking about where my organic matter ends and the Earth's begins.
2. 1 Sensations: Reflecting on Bodily Landscape Practice
I imagine that Mendieta was often left with bits of the land on her body when she laid in the dirt, dug, and carved. In Ana Mendieta: Fuego De Tierra, a documentary produced in 1987, two years after Mendieta's death, her family members, colleagues, and teachers provide unique insight on her life and work. Dr. Wallace Tomasini, director of the University of Iowa School of Art and Mendieta's teacher during her MFA, recalls,
I was struck immediately by her sense of independence of intelligence, her ability to ask incredibly sometimes provoking question, and I found that in her studio work at that time, her painting and her drawing, she was obviously searching. I guess it was when she first began working in multimedia—she’d already got a master degree and was moving onto an MFA in multimedia and did some of that before when she was working with video film and performance— that I felt that Ana really found herself and found a means of expression that could really take off from her own inner self, where she was able to combine her own feelings about humanity, about politics, about society in general, about women’s issues who was in a way always fighting for certain kinds of rights and not only herself but for other people as well. she may have been small but there was an awful lot of dynamite in that very small package (Ana Mendieta: Fuego De Tierra, 1987).
Dr. Tomasini's observation about Mendieta's move from a masters in painting to an MFA in intermedia struck a cord with me. I too felt that I was 'searching' for my voice during my years as a painter, and as I have fumbled through an incredibly experimental drawing masters, I have moved into a medium that more directly allows me to express my research and experience. As both Kate Terry and Sarah Woodfine mentioned to me in tutorials this past Spring 2023, my work seems more successful in its communication when it is process-oriented, rather than symbolic/ representational. My older sci-fi futuristic paintings depicted extreme landscapes, existing in the tradition of feminist and Marxist critique honed in the speculative fiction tradition. In retrospect, I feel that I was communicating political frustration and observations about nature that are now directly expressed by simply touching and manipulating actual landscapes. In the literal crouching form in my older paintings and my posture during my current art practice, I believe that I always really wanted to be the powerful cyborgs that I was painting.
Left: My painting Thermal Layering (2021); Right: Me digging in my garden bed in Brockley, UK (2023)
Juan Sanchez, an artistic peer of Mendieta, observed that “she felt at her best when the creative process became more physical. In other words, when her whole body was part of creating the piece, she felt more at one" (Ana Mendieta: Fuego De Tierra, 1987). This summer, during my residency with ISLE in Deer Isle, ME, USA, I struggled in my first few iterations of making OCEAN CRATER. At the center of my challenges was that I felt strongly that I should not require assistance in making my artwork, no matter the scale— which begged the question, why do I feel strongly that I should work on my own? I have since come to the conclusion that working without assistance (note: I am a huge believer in collaboration, which I hold as distinct from assistance) is critical because my work is process based: I must wholly experience the sensations of working in the landscape while I create my work in order for the work to resolve in an authentic manner that reflects my phenomenological experience and political beliefs. One aspect of this solo experience involves the physicality of working with materials that are not explicitly engineered for art making in the way paint or charcoal are. There is inconvenience and incredible effort involved in manipulating multimedia, site-based materials, like the fishing nets and ropes I used to make OCEAN CRATER. I relate to Mendieta's sense of feeling "more at one" through the physical labor poured into her work.
My diagram (to the right) is a rough sketch of the types of phenomena induced by working in the landscape. The materiality of the environment induces three types of sensations that I have been able to identify so far:
Body-Material sensations: The touch, smell, taste, sound, and visual appearance of landscape materials. These sensations provide observations about material properties.
Body-Movement sensations: Due to the properties of the landscape, and my conceived plan for the artwork, the experience of the positions I must hold, the movements I must make, and the energy I must expend.
Mind-Material sensations: A bidirectional occurrence, involving 1) the intentionality directed towards the environment, and 2) the environment's impact on neurologically (chemical changes, thoughts etc.). These two phenomena feed into each other.
By working as physically as possible, I build energy that accrues over the course of the project. In mending 2000 square feet of netting, and hitching its 400 pound structure taught to the neighboring trees by myself, my finger strength notably increased, my arms and legs hardened, and my stamina under the sun grew. I found myself in a flow by the end of the project, embracing intense rainstorm conditions and heat rather than experiencing discomfort. Artists often find that a warm up is required in order to produce their best work, and for me, the warm up should and must be physical.
I am particularly interested in examining the first part of mind-material sensations and fleshing out its mechanism. In the "Intentionality" section of History of the Concept of Time, Martin Heidegger describes "intentionality" as a person's conscious "directing-itself" or focus "towards which" an object. In other words, intentionality is not defined by the qua-object in and of itself or the object intended upon, but rather, is about one's psychological state.
Note 1: I believe that my older paintings from 2020-2022 were very much about directly expressing Mind-Material sensations to their audience.
Note 2: My starting interest in the archeologist's psychology, and why archeologists choose their profession, is now way better contextualized by Heideggerian intentionality towards landscape.
2.2 Inadvertent Vs. Overt Imbedding of Objects
Back to where I started at the beginning of 1. Materiality, I want to return to the "inadvertent" imbedding of materials that occurs during my practice. Note that I use "inadvertent" to say that while I take precautions not to seriously injure myself, I do not take great strides to prevent cuts, splinters, etc.
After a tutorial in October with Sarah Woodfine, I have found it helpful to contextualize my actions in contrast to artists who do, quite overtly, imbed themselves with materials. For instance, the French artist Gina Pane (1939-1990), in her work Action Sentimentale (1973) burrows thorns into her forearm and then cuts her hand with a razor blade as part of a ritual, performed in front of a female-only audience. In other cases still, she cuts her eyelids or licks shards of glass with her tongue.
Richard Saltoun Gallery's press release of Action Psyche, a 2019 exhibition of Pane's major work, gives us more insight into the mechanism of the work. Pane comes up with these mutilative performances beforehand, and provides her cameraman with "detailed diagrams and sketches to indicate the intense moments she wished to be captured on camera," making the photography part of the artwork as opposed to simple documentation (Gina Pane: Action Psyche, 2019). And according to this press
release, "Pane sought to reveal and transform the way we have been taught to experience our body in relation to the self and others. She defined the body as "a place of the pain and suffering, cunning and hope, of despair and illusion. Her actions strived to reconnect the forces of the subconscious with the collective memory of the human psyche, and the sacred or the spiritual." I take Saltoun gallery to mean that Pane was interested in centering her overt imbedding of objects into her body as a way to wake up the anatomy, to reposition itself personally and politically.
I do somewhat struggle to understand the necessity of the form Pane worked in. With both her and Marina Abramovic, I question self-mutilation as art form, especially when it is not interactive. I can justify the bodily pain Abramovic endures in her interactive work, Rhythm 0 (1974), where she lets people do whatever they want to her with a series of laid out objects, because through the horrible actions done onto her during the performance, she reveals something about humanity; yet, in her solo performance work like Lips of Thomas, where she cuts a star into her stomach with a razor blade and then whips herself for an hour, I question whether she must really study the phenomenology of fear and pain and their transformation through self-mutilation. My instinct is in fact that the work should not be so valued by places like the Royal Academy, most recently, without serious examination. The cynic in me may even think Lips of Thomas was about shock value. Along this vein, Isabella Scott, a writer for FRIEZE, reviewed Pane's exhibition at Saltoun, asking the question, "A new show at Richard Saltoun begs the question – how effective is self-inflicted violence?" In the article, Scott does consider the context of female suffering that Pane is working with, but critiques that, "despite her intentions, the artist’s methodology is troubling. By using her body as a sacrificial object, spilling her blood to shock an audience into sensitivity, perhaps even deliverance, her actions subscribe to the idea that looking at violence increases our potential for empathy – yet the opposite may also be true. ‘The practice of violence, like all actions, changes the world,’ wrote Hannah Arendt in On Violence (1970), ‘but the most probable change is a more violent world.'"
Scott does a great job suggesting that female artist mutilation may not actually combat, and may even contribute, to greater violence. Her review has helped me clarify that the type of feminism that I wish to instantiate in my work must be subtle in order to be effective. I am interesting in asserting the power of my body as clearly as it can be studied in the labor-intensive, solid, and large-scale of my artworks. More specifically though, I am not interested in feminism that asserts that "woman can do whatever a man can do," but rather, that the female possesses power with distinct properties and voice. Among these qualities is the way I handle discomfort and pain, and the way I approach the environment to work with it rather than around it.
2. 3 Processing Material
I have discussed discussed materiality in terms of my 'material process.' The inverse of this, and an equally important aspect of materiality study, is how I 'process materials,' transforming them through iterative casting.
Production of GARDEN CRATERS began in April 2023, and since then, I have begun to make paper casts of my plaster casts. From hole (left), to sculpture (middle), to compressed paper (right), my digging action now has documentation in 3 forms.
As I mention in section 1.3, I titled my degree show work with the word "Crater" in reference to James Turrell's Roden Crater, which has been under construction for 50 years now. My experience of learning about how this monumental hole has developed and changed over the years mirrors the iterative material play in my own work.
My first observation, in comparing the different 'craters' I have made, is that the essence of the structure remains strong, almost like a stamp, across its negative, positive, and flattened forms. The final ink and paper media, though, in its material translation of GARDEN CRATERS, feels more violent. In discussing Dirt Bed (which, as a side note, I may want to rename) with my peers and Sarah Woodfine before the I Don't Understand Your Drawing show, Sarah expressed that this newest cast was becoming more serious. If anything, I think that reprocessing materials, like a siv, may begin to bring the political impetus behind my digging into clearer focus.
4. Conclusion
In this critical reflection, "Taking the Garden As It Could Be," I am starting to clarify my psychological, and physical, and political relationship to space and materials. Although organizing my thoughts was quite painful to begin with, I now believe that I have only begun to scratch the surface of the topics I am writing about, and see this essay as an early work in progress. This Winter, I will begin to write a chapter on BODY, examining how mental and physical health impact practice, and inform process.
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