Exhibition & Text: Human
Contemporary art by London-based female artists
German Residence, Belgravia Square, London
October 9th 2017 – 30th January 2018
Talk at the German Residence 19th January 2018
“The lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep.” Robert Macfarlane.
My response to the theme of Human lies in two different pieces – The Drawing Machine and Shroud of a Drove Road.
The concept of the exhibition ‘Human’ is the stuff of epics stories, poetry, biblical writings, paintings, history and so on.
I wanted to express the incidence, coincidence and transience of the marks that we, as human beings, make during our lifetime. Here time is not linear. Recordings, impressions, and our creations all conjoin into one moment. Of the billions of humans that have inhabited this world, only a fraction has ever been recorded or known –a name, a voice, their appearance and gait where and how they lived. Most are just dust under our feet. Our memory span is so short. My Shrouds reach back to capture those earlier inhabited spaces.
“Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one…” Robert MacFarlane
The Drove Road Shroud, 104cm x 126cm
I decided to record commonly used places and spaces that made up some of the daily experience of people who inhabited them. I have made impressions using linen sheets and Icelandic volcanic ash as pigment, from Landmannalaugar. These Shrouds are an act of collective memory of windows, dry-stone walling, ancient and well-trodden flag stone floors, old barns. The Shroud here is called Drove Road, Dorset. Drove roads are ancient paths through which drovers of livestock drove to and from fields, villages, towns and markets. The paths connected people to places. They are like an arterial network throughout Britain. This drove road has been worn down to its bedrock by the passage of people. The sculpture had to convey the sense of loss the fleeting nature of any impression that we leave behind us.
Robert Macfarlane wrote: “paths were imprinted with the ‘dreams’ of each traveller who had walked it and that his own experiences would in course of time [also] lie under men’s feet.”
Soil pigments waiting to be ground up
The companion piece is a drawing machine. It is made from found objects. In themselves each component is made from instruments that have been created to measure ourselves within our world: weight, load, compression, suspension, swing, time, frequency, vibration and rhythm. I have combined these to make a machine that draws only when pushed by people. It is a positive act sculpture - dependent on one’s frame of mind and the force used - the drawing machine records our gestures and interactions, to make a complete drawing of what it is like to be human.
“The lines we leave behind us, the spacious weave, our wake, then sleep.” Robert Macfarlane
