High Vis
My fascination with high vis colours began during an artist residency in Epping Forest. The colours of the forest were as you’d expect, brown, green and grey hues. However I began documenting signs of human activity and evidence of intervention in this maintained forest and this was often seen through bright and contrasting colours. Florescent pinks, blues and yellows were spotted in the distant in the high-vis jackets of workmen maintaining the forest, coloured dots on trees as a code for removal or attention of some kind or blue plastic bags tangled in tree branches. This pallet of colour came to represent human interference, maintenance or intervention and I have continued to use these colours as a metaphor throughout a lot of my work.
The Urban Forest
This work is the culmination of a 6 month ENAS commissioned residency in Epping Forest, that I carried out with my artist collaborator Hannah Stageman. The resulting artwork was exhibited in the Gibbard Gallery in Harlow in autumn of 2015.
During the residency we explored the relationship that humans have had with the forest over time. How we have used, manipulated and changed it for different purposes and how this has tried to be regulated. We were inspired by the spirit of the people who lived in the Forest and shaped its history and ecology such as John Clare, the 19th century “Peasant Poet” who was a resident in Dr Matthew Allen’s private asylum at High Beach and walked from there back home in Northborough. Clare lamented the destruction of the Forest due to the Industrial Revolution and through Enclosures which prevented commoner’s rights.
In 1878 the Epping Forest Act was passed and Queen Victoria declared, “It gives me the greatest satisfaction to dedicate this beautiful forest to the use and enjoyment of my people for all time," the enclosure’s fences were removed and commoner’s rights restored and it became “The People’s Forest.”
The work we created for the final exhibition reflected on the ways in which the forest is used with particular attention to the form of the forest and unique structure due to its history of tree lopping and maintenance.
This work really was the catalyst for the themes that I would go on to explore further during the rest of my MFA.
Sliced
Having identified key themes during the Epping Forest residency, I was keen to expand further these and had that opportunity with my first MFA piece of work, which was exhibited in the corridor exhibition outside our studios. I was particularly intrigued by taking natural objects, a tree slice in this case, and manipulating them to change their aesthetics to look man-made. To do this I polished and waxed the surface of the slice to a plastic-like finish and flocked the edges with short florescent pink fibres.
This used similar techniques and methods that I had used for the Gibbard Gallery exhibition such as flocking and use of fluorescent pink as an indication of human presence.
Having always created work with a 3d element I was keen to explore the possibility of working in 2d. I had been attending a lot of the print making inductions and was particularly taken with the intensity of block colours achieved with screen printing. I was keen to work with the florescent colours as a presentation of the manmade and are used as the opposite to camouflage. I had also been exploring ways in which we have shaped the environments around us and in particular the nature within our domestic domains. One of the most extreme examples of this is the formal shaping of hedges and bushes through the art of topiary. I was fascinated by the shapes these are often formed into, most commonly geometric blocks of triangles and squares. These straight edges and solid forms give a neat and constrained look to the otherwise unruly hedge that display the control enforced by man’s manipulation. Topiary has so many connotations with power and wealth, coming primarily from the wealthy Renaissance gardens of the rich who could afford to pay groundkeepers to maintain immaculate gardens with not a leaf out of place.
The series of 11 screen prints that I produced played with the distortion of the geometric shapes the topiary had been pruned into. By isolating their form and removing any trace of stem or trunk I wanted them to float in space with a focus on their pure form and to emphasize the obscurity the practice. I chose to block the shapes in florescent shades of pink and yellow to remove them even further from their natural state, playing on the idea of the human interference, nature being manipulated into something other than its nature state for the pleasure of human whims.
Isolated topiary
Areas of Research
Topiary
Topiary is the art of pruning and training live perennial plants, primarily bushes, trees and shrubs into defined shapes, often geometric and sometimes fanciful. Topiary has a long and interesting history from Ancient Rome, the Far East, and its popularity in the Renaissance period. It is currently seen in formal gardens as well as suburban middle class front yards.
Because it has been used in such diverse settings there are a number of different connotations associated with Topiary. Primarily wealth and power due to its use by the rich who have the resources to hire gardeners to maintain and design their gardens. It is interesting then how Topiary has been adopted by the middle class for their suburban front gardens and the connotations this implies. However, I am primarily concerned the ethical and aesthetic issues in relation to the art of topiary, including the contortion of nature and the humanizing effects of sentimentality and falsification of nature.
