The decay of a white lily within a Perspex box
When proposing work for exhibition in the Crypt gallery I began to think about death and burials and I came across the following quote from a cemetery sale promotion.
Mausoleum crypts are clean, dry, ventilated chambers which protect precious remains from the chill dampness of the ground.
— Cemetery sales promotion
This naturally brought me to the idea of bodies returning to the earth. In my previous research I had been exploring our perceived disconnect between ourselves and nature. By choosing to be buried in a crypt it means that your body can not be returned to the earth to fulfil the ‘life cycle’, a concept often seen as too privative and undignified.
With this in mind I wanted to experiment with preserving organic forms within airtight containers and built a yellow Perspex box which I sealed while lilies – flowers often associated with funerals – inside. I was interested to document the decay of these flowers. During this process I also began researching other artists that explored ideas of preservation such as Mark Quinn’s Eternal Spring series of works where he has captured and encased flowers at the point of full bloom. These artworks aim to take snap shots of moments to preserve perfection. Another artist whose work was influential was Damien Hurst. A lot of his work deals with life and death. In his piece A thousand years he demonstrates the never ending cyclical process of birth and death, playing god by creating an enclosed world for this to happen within and showing nature in its rawest and most basic form.
The dried bones of a flower
In another exploration into decay and preservation of organic forms I wanted to try encasing flowers in bone white plaster. Issues with the plaster not sticking the waxy surface of the flower and stem made this more difficult than expected and the results were disappointing.
The most successful casts were of the flower pods before they opened. The plaster stuck to the flower well after a few tries and the resulting pod became a curious object, quite unrecognisable from its original form. The pods reminded me of a cocoon and had a sadness about them. A cocoon that would never hatch or a flower that would never bloom. Through human intervention the natural progression of this bud to flower would never be fulfilled.
The chill dampness of the ground
To lay a dead body to rest in a crypt means to trap it inside a coffin, inside a wall, meaning the remains would never degrade and be allowed to return to the earth, losing all connection with the soil. With that in mind I wanted to bring the earth back into the crypt, to reconnect with the human remains by physically bringing soil into the space.
Working with similar geometric pink flocked shapes that I had made for Pink Mist, I created sculptural forms from them to echo organic growth of crystalline structures you might find in a cave. These forms were meant to be slightly surreal in their context, looking human-made and fake. With a reference to Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperreal’, I wanted to bring an artificial and otherworldly quality to the installation emphasising the artificiality of the crypt burial.
Once installed I wasn’t completely satisfied with the resulting piece but this may have been a result of feeling rushed to create work after a summer of disconnection from the course and lack of facilities and tools to make it. Although the feedback from my fellow students was mostly positive I would have liked to make the work to a higher standard given more time.
Roots
On a walk through Epping Forest I came across another fallen tree. This time it had been uprooted and although most of the roots had been broken off, the base of them remained intact. I was interested in creating an artwork with an uprooted tree as the starting form. Roots in themselves denote a connection with the earth and this was something that I wanted to explore further in my work. Trees can so often have human qualities and the forest a society of beings, connected by the earth but separate. Living collectively and sharing the same conditions but growing as individuals. In my practice I am interested in the disconnect we feel with Nature and by using trees as a metaphor for ourselves I think we can understand our connection better. Much like the fallen trees that the architecture practice MUF displayed in their work ‘Wood for the Trees’ and Angela Palmers piece ‘ Ghost Forest’ I wanted to show the tree with the roots still attached. Having been violently wrenched from the ground, the tree processes a raw quality, exposing the tree’s underbelly and its life veins. This violence changes our perception with the tree and rather than seeing them as timber, a dead material, it becomes a living being.
I toyed with a few ideas on what to do with the tree and initially created a spike for the tree to sit on, just hoovering above the floor. I wanted to display the tree in a way that made us question our relationship with it. It was spiked for the practicality of keeping it upright and but also elevated it majestically, like a trophy or a lion’s head on a wall plaque, questioning our complex relationship with natures being – often destroying it to enjoy it.
I also experimented with the idea of the tree attached to the ceiling, as if growing through to the floor above, the roots floating in mid-air. This softer approach had very different connotations and rather than focusing on the death of the tree it suggested continued growth. By allowing the viewer to walk around and under the roots it places them in a unique position. This was a very complicated installation and something that I may experiment with at a future time.
Disconnection
Another core theme that my work explores the disconnect we feel with nature and this inherent separation of ourselves from it. We too often think of ourselves as 'other' and the consequences of this are seen in the way we treat the planet and other living beings. These ideas are explored in details in James Lovelock's iconic text 'Gaia' and Ecology without Nature by Timothy Morton, in which nature is discussed as a living organism. Along the thread of the Dark Ecology movement, it is discussed in an unromanticised way, allowing us to view nature with a different lens.
Bibliography
Areas of Research
James Lovelock: Gaia - A New Look at Life on Earth
I had been aware of Lovelocks theory of Gaia for a number of years but never fully read into it until now. The theory of Gaia proposes that planet Earth operates as a single organism and all living matter air, ocean, and land surfaces forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life.
This seems like an obviously conclusion to arrive at and so there was nothing particularly ground-breaking to me when reading his book. However, I am aware that he first proposed this theory in the 1970s and since then the idea has become more embedded in common thought through the environmental movement. A lot of the book was very science based with tables of chemical compositions that make up various elements of Gaia and I struggled to stay engaged during these chapters. For my research, the most interesting chapters were when discussing the human elements of Gaia and our effect on it.
Ecology without nature by Tim Morton
This book aims to rethink our relationship with nature, “to think through an argument about what we mean by the word itself”. This wasn’t the easiest concept to grasp as it is so contrary to most ways of thinking and it’s hard to break conventional environmental aesthetic as our cultural norm.
As I understood this book, Morton was trying to move away from the romantic notion of nature often depicted in art. He refers to this concept as Dark Ecology, where humans hold no privilege. Environment or nature is everything around us and so by separating it as something independent we are able to detach and distance ourselves, which as discussed in Ken Wilber’s book is a the first steps to unhappiness and all things bad with this world. These two books are complimentary in their ideas and approaches and really useful as a reference in terms of my own ideas.
Dark ecology
A concept first proposed by Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology is the notion that nature does not privilege the human and revokes a romanticised nature often depicted in art. I am particularly interested in how it ties in with the theory of Gaia that I have been researching. The reimagining of ecology for a modern age and our impact on the planet is especially relevant in the face of climate change and exploring how humans are connected to the world.
The Dutch Sonic Arts and Curator Hilde Methi have initiated a three-year art, research and commissioning project called Dark Ecology, and have been working in collaboration with Norwegian, Russian and other European partners. The project includes a series of lectures, commissioned artworks and research by artists, theorists, designers, curators, scientists, writers, makers, and researchers who all are interested in exploring the notion of Dark Ecology.
