Portable Grove

Environmental art project: Albuquerque New Mexico, USA 2009.

 At the beginning of September 2009 I travelled to New Mexico to begin work on the project Portable Grove, which was commissioned jointly by the Richard Levy Gallery and the City of Albuquerque Public Arts program.

The vision for the project was that in the summer and autumn of 2009 many of New Mexico’s arts organizations would join together to present LAND / ART, which would explore relationships of land, art and community through exhibitions, site specific art works, lectures and culminate in the publication of a book.

Historically New Mexico is best known for the first generation of Land Art or Earthworks, including major projects such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field and Charles Ross’s Star Axis. 

The project I completed through the technique of  ”pyrography” was to give new life to dead trees. The idea by way of pyrography is loosely based on organic formations as found in classic ornamentation, there designs/motifs, my memories of them from childhood and how they became indicators of  time, accessibility and substitute for nature.  My interest for these images is the way in which they often depicted nature in the form of landscape. By drawing on this aspect for inspiration I was able to high lighten the contrast between the constructivist, sophisticated, repetitive form and that of nature in its rawest of forms. And by incorporating concealed repeats in the patterning I was able to give the impression that the ornamentation had somehow of its own accord grown out of the tree almost like the formation of a protective surface, a skin or bark, constantly expanding, engulfing the surface of the tree.

Bringing it to life with new vibrant movement, in a harmonious combination that reached out to the extremities of the dried out limbs.

By working with these ideas to focus on the fragility and ephemeral nature not only of classical ornamentation but of life itself and how many experiences and memories to a large extent are not found or recorded in any historical records.