‘Maintained (RCMP)’
Within the grounds just outside the Houses of Parliament in London there is a small square of grass surrounded by a number identical trees. Every autumn when their leaves turn orange the gardener can be seen climbing a step ladder and plucking every leaf from their branches before it has a chance to fall to the ground. On investigation by the Independent, the official reason for this was one of economics - The leaves are removed each winter as a more time-efficient alternative to raking fallen leaves.
The absurdity of this encapsulated the ideas of control and the maintenance of nature that I had been exploring and this felt especially relevant happening in a place built with the sole purpose of instilling law and order.
I was keen to create work in response to this and the best way I felt to so this would be by creating a piece of video art, a new medium for me. Inspired by the way in which Andy Goldsworthy creates work outdoors of a temporary nature, I decided to recreate the plucking of leaves but in a rural setting and as part of a farcical council maintenance plan for rural areas – Rural Control and Maintenance Plan (RCMP). Drawing from my experience working with councils on public art projects I was often faced with tedious and seemingly endless bureaucracy. Long documents would be produced full of eye wateringly boring language and indecipherable acronyms. Within the 3.5 minute video I produced I tried to reflect this by having a middle aged sounding, white male’s voice, reading quotes from a genuine council maintenance plan, evidently never meant to be read aloud, whilst a sped up visual of a maintenance worker in high vis jacket plucks the autumnal leaves from a small tree.
Although initially unsure as to the success of this video, the more I have worked and re-edited it, I felt it got closer to achieving my objective - to create a satirical piece of work, quite different from anything I had previously made and exploring new mediums. If I was to create another video piece I would pay more attention to the quality of the film-making and editing as I'm aware this has an amateur feel to it due to my technical abilities in these areas.
Control and Maintain
‘Tidied’
From my experiments with form and geometry when looking at topiary I felt I wanted to develop the idea of sweeping leaves into piles as an act of tidying up nature. By moulding and gluing the leaves into a very formal pyramid shape, I wanted to give a sense of permanence and order to them. With initial appreciation for how this would work and having researched various construction methods, I was pleased when the simplest and first method I tried using PVA glue and a wooden mould worked successfully.
One of the strongest themes running through my work has been the exploration into our need to control or maintain nature. Evidence of this can be seen in every environment humans live. Large scale examples of this are our urban cities literally blanketing nature in a layer of concrete with allocated green spaces and parks allowing a maintain nature to exist in certain areas under certain restricted conditions. I am also interested in the smaller scale examples of this control in the everyday maintenance we do to the nature that surrounds us such as topiary brushes that are trimmed to neat and 'unnatural' shapes and the pruning and 'tiding' of fallen leaves in autumn. reading around this subject has led me to a few key texts such as Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco and The Cultivated Wilderness, or What is Landscape? by Paul Shepheard.
47% Green
Prior to enrolling on the MFA course, the public artworks I was commissioned to do were usually part of regeneration schemes within urban areas. My research was primarily focused on the social or historical context of the area, by remit of the commissioner. Having now developed my own artistic practice in a different and more focused way, I have been struggling with whether I could return to these types of commissions once I graduate in a way that would still be relevant to my own practice and development as an artist.
In July last year I was offered a public art commission to be sited near London Bridge Station, in situ for 4 months. Although unfortunately this never coming to fruition, this gave me the opportunity to explore ideas relating to my practice that were also suitable for this type of commission in terms of relating to the area the artwork was to be sited.
Choosing to focus on the spaces allocated for nature in London I discovered that London is made up of 47% green space. There are 8 million trees in the City, 3,000 parks, 30,000 allotments, three million gardens and two national nature reserves. In urban areas nature can be measured and counted in this way when in contrast to the urban and grey surrounding. But this is of course an illusion - nature has never left, it’s just hiding, lurking under every paving slab waiting for the opportunity to emerge and reveal itself. I am interested in the idea that nature is only aloud to bloom in areas that we allocate for it – it is confined and restricted and consistently maintained. This idea is explored in the book 'Edgelands, Journeys into England’s True Wilderness' by Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley.
The images opposite are digital visualisations made using Photoshop for two proposal ideas. This is a method I often use when applying for commissions and is a useful way to visualise ideas.
Trimmed in Yellow
This work came about in an interested in the connotations of topiary and how it is viewed in other contexts. As detailed in The Ethics and Aesthetics of Topiary, an essay by Isis Brook and Emily Brady, it grew in popularity during the renaissance period and since has always been associated with wealth and power. I find it interesting how topiary is used in modern day and it can both be formal and twee depending on the setting. From fake plastic hanging hedge balls to amateur attempts on garden hedges, topiary is a common site amongst the front gardens in middle class suburbia, suggesting ideas of grandeur.
From exploring this, I feel like I could continue down a multitude of paths such as the idea of show and display, ownership of land and suburban ascetics. I’m a little hesitant to continue along these paths of thought as they seem a little off track from my research question. For now I have tried to experiment with my limited digital skills to produce a piece of work that touches very lightly on all these ideas.
These digital experiments also reminded me of John Baldesari's print in which he covers heads with coloured dots.
The People's Forest
This was my final degree piece and consists of seven vertically sliced trees suspended on the wall and back lit with pink led lights.
All the trees were taken from Epping Forest and were found already fallen. This ancient forest in East London was declared by Queen Victoria in 1882 as 'The People's Forest', changing our relationship with this area of land to one of ownership, resource and responsibility.
The trees have been mounted on the wall as if hunting trophies and the artificiality of the pink light contrasts with the organic nature of the trees in their raw state fresh from the forest. This artificial pink is a colour I have used consistently as a representation of human intervention.
Umberto Eco: Travels in Hyperreality
Eco discusses the real versus the fake within this book, especially in terms of landscape. I was recommended this book on the bases of my research into artificial landscapes and the desire to recreate nature more ‘perfect’ than the original. Although an area of research I am interested in I felt that this took me down an avenue of study that I wasn’t ready to explore and would dilute my current thinking. I am certain I will return to this at some point later in critical analysis of my work and so in that sense it has been useful to lay the foundations for future exploration into the topic.
Bibliography
Paul Shepheard: The Cultivated Wilderness, or What is Landscape?
In this book by Paul Shepheard, he outlines six types of landscape and the ways in which we have treated the surface of our world. He discusses the various strategies that have been employed in how we have shaped these landscapes.
Although hard to pin down I did feel that this book covered relevant issues to my work such as the intereactions between humans and their environment, albeit in a general and slightly poetic way that never quite got to the heart of what I was trying to find.
Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley: Edgelands, Journeys into England’s True Wilderness
I found concept of edge lands fascinating, these forgotten portions of land on the boarders of ‘real’ landscape that are often referred to as wastelands. This idea was also discussed by Justin Carter in his Artist Talk at Wimbledon UAL. What is it a waste of? Is the human and often very rich wildlife not valid in that landscape because it serves little economic function and isn’t seen as aseptically beautiful as a landscape?
I am particularly taken by the concept of rural and urban and this book highlights the boarders between those two, an idea that I hadn’t previously spent taken the time to consider. From reading this book, I have taken away ideas of perspective and uses of land. Although relevant to the ideas within my own practice it takes me on a slight tangent and so it will certainly inform my work, but in the larger sense than directly at this stage.
The Ethics and Aesthetics of Topiary: Essay by Isis Brook and Emily Brady, published in Ethics and the Environment 8:1 2003, 127-142.
Having stumbled across this paper via an internet search I was excited to find such in-depth writing on the exact issues and questions I had been pondering on the practice of Topiary. In this journal paper, Brook and Brandy discuss 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.
Although written through a critical eye of the practice, they outline the history and development of how it has evolved and pass judgement on the various styles. I found this paper extremely helpful in my own thinking and analysis of the subject and it brought clarity to some ideas I was beginning to develop on the way that Topiary has been used in gardens and the way in which it is viewed.
Influential Artists
Parliament tree plucking
In November of 2014, a story broke in most of the national papers that a gardener had been employed to pluck all the autumnal leaves from the trees around an area of grass outside within the grounds of The Houses of Parliament. The officially word being that it was a more efficient and economic method of removing the leaves than waiting for them to fall and sweeping them up.
I felt compelled to create work in response to this absurd story and created my video piece ‘Maintained - (RCMP)’. I was particularly taken with where this tree plucking was happening, in a place that is built to create law and order within our society and so it seemed apt that they should also extend this to their natural environment within Parliaments grounds.
Andy Goldsworthy
An artist that I have always been inspired by is Andy Goldsworthy who also uses natural forms and natural materials to create his artworks.
His work is temporary which gives it a sense of the ethereal. I also like the environmental, seasonal and durational aspect of the way in which he works.
John Baldessari
I have found some common ground in the visual look of some of my artworks, in particularly my exploration into digital image making with ‘Trimmed in Yellow’.
Much like how Baldessari covered faces and key aspects of his images with coloured dots to force us to ask how and what the image is communicating, I have used a similar method but instead to highlight the artificial. This creates a light humour and pop-art element to my work as it does in Baldessairs.
