Interzone Exhibition
November 11- 15 | Peckham Levels, Floor 5
Natsuki Iwamoto and I were selected for the show Interzone by Jacob Clayton (who procured the Peckham Levels space and will also show his work). Over the course of the past two months, Natsuki, Jacob, and I have met regularly, discussing how the term "interzone" works within our practice and slowly working towards more specific key terms that our artworks share.
Ultimately, I showed 3 different works for Interzone: 1) a TV monitor displaying a live monitor of my garden bed in Brockley, 2) 4 teeth-like triangle molds I made in the Fall of 2022, and 3) a three-part plaster cast attached to a wooden and steel armature, titled Rachis Paralysis.
Interzone group meeting 3 My notes from meeting 3
The following is a description of "interzone" from artist and show curator, Jacob Clayton:
Taken from William Burrough’s novel ‘Naked Lunch’ (1959), ‘Interzone’ represents a fictional departure 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 areas. 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 objective 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.
When I think about where interzones exist in my practice, the garden and science fiction come to mind. As I discuss in the 1. SPACE chapter of my critical reflection, the urban garden acts as a reprieve from the tightly packed space issues that London suffers from (and the London artist especially suffers from this when storing work and procuring studio space). In the garden, I can maintain an ambition of scale and simultaneously, an acute awareness of my environment. A space-between-spaces, the garden becomes a powerful tool for me to directly confront scale and physicality in the city. And when I dig in this interzone, I feel that I am able to inhabit a new bodily form whose posture crouches, whose hands inspect the dirt with instinctual primacy, and whose mind feels clearly. More and more, I feel that I am myself, but also cyborg, when I dig. In this sense, the interzone is psychological—the craters I dig are portals to the inhabitance of a creature from a speculative fiction universe.
Rachis Paralysis process images, including: the plaster casting of teeth-like sculptures in hand-dug holes, the imbedding of a retired zucchini plant (after the end of its season), and the creation of a wooden and steel armature to hold the casts upright.
With other artists and responding to a specific theme, Interzone has sparked an important development in my work, pushing my digging practice in a new direction. I am gaining particular interest in skeletons, armature, and spines, specifically the connection between my posture when I dig and the rooted systems of plants as they grow from where I dig. In hindsight, my collection of wooden cacti skeletons was the first iteration of this interest. The foundry kilns have been under repair, but I have prepped these skeletons to be bronze casted this Spring 2024:
Cactus skeletons from Southern Spain, prepped with green wax coating for bronze casting.
In addition to the cactus bronze casts, I have been thinking about making a sister piece to Paralysis Rachis, which considers how the bathtub is a hole/receptacle the holds my body regularly. I plan to paint the bathtub with dirt hand markings, like I am digging a hole, and then place a courgette plant in the bathtub. Finally, I procured Soju, 35gsm long fiber Japanese paper, that is both flexible and incredibly strong, and I will print the inside of the bathtub with the Soju paper. Hopefully, the resulting print will have outlined spine and dirt marks, and 2D flatten the blueprint of the bathtub shape.