As I’ve walked, through the landscape and seasons, I have collected wild flowers and brought them home to press. I wasn’t entirely sure if I should/would use them in my body of work. Then, admittedly after reading a lot of DeLanda and Deleuze and Guattari, I was thinking about how they do belong in my assemblage. Bringing together the earth pigments, poetry, monorpints, photographs and pressed flowers, is a bringing together of diverse components to create a body of work where the meaning is about my, and the various artwork’s, connection with the landscape and each other. I am trying to embrace the complexity and micro experiences, to challenge my expectations and steer away from fixed ideas. This risk taking and stretching out of my boundaries, is part of my transformative learning experience, and, I believe, where the magic happens.
The body of work includes material components (soil, flowers, handmade paper etc), expressive components (symbolism of the self, time, nature etc), territorial components (the materials are actually of the land) and cultural components (environmental art/land art, folklore and culture being lost in Sussex).
I’ve come to realise that the act of gathering pigments and flowers from my landscape is a territorial act, I am rooting myself and my work to a very specific place both physically and in time. I keep coming back to this idea of place and why some places feel deeply important (Sussex and Cornwall). A reminder to myself to go back to the beginning of this module and re-read the various books I have collected about psychogeography and place.
I also like the unpredictability of the materials and methods that I have been experimenting with, there is a constant element of risk. I can’t help but reflect too, that they are often fragile, like the emerging self.
By taking seemingly simple materials and changing their context – for instance I will be exhibiting my earth pigment print at Ditchling Artwave festival and would like to create a pamphlet of combined image and text, I am deterritorializing them. The earth, flowers, words, images take on new roles and meanings outside of what they are and outside of me. Other people will look at them and get something different.
Since reading about Dubuffet and his assemblages and use of unusual materials, I have been inspired to include the many things that I am interested in. The idea of the palimpsest, layers, micro experiences born out of the fact that my experience of self-discovery is not linear by rhizomatic. I also love the use of materials that challenge the stereotype of art, this feels important to me because I never felt ‘arty’ but I think I was thinking of fine art. The use of unconventional materials and a range of different mediums/processes feels like a Dubuffet style of art brut. It feels like a raw, expression of myself. My final body of work evokes more than just the things included in it, the authenticity, the connection to my inner and outer landscapes, is not about one single element of my metaphorical and physical journey, but the interaction of them all.
Delanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013) A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Dubuffet, J. (2021) Brutal Beauty Munich: Prestel Verlag.
