Cultivating the Community
the Process
In recent years my art practice has been changing, in the work as Community Artist for Conniburrow, I rediscovered my process which was influenced by the time I spent in the community orchard, where I grieved for my Father. The orchard provided a space that reconnected me with the cycles of nature, the continuing process of life and death, and an expanded view of the natural patterns that surround our existance. I found myself asking questions, planting sunflower seeds, germinating ideas, observing the growth, seeing the potential, reaping the rewards, I felt immersed and connected to the pattern of life, whilst marking time. I worked closely with the learning team, City Club project artists Georgie Manley, Townley and Bradley, and exhibited the results of my personal artistic journey including giant dried sunflower heads, and sunflowers presented in vases in the Fibonacci sequence, alongside Georgie Manley’s artistic floral response, in the MK Gallery Project Space.
the VALUE
I planted sunflower seeds, this represented the many ideas I had formed, whilst waiting for germination, I realised how this related to my own process of developing ideas, I found patterns, sequences, and cycles in nature, that were relevant to my art practice. Each seed holds the potential of life, each idea a prospective new creation, I noticed seedling growth was influenced by the environment, light source, temperature, and water, basic building blocks of life. As my ideas developed, some didn’t mature, others went in totally different directions, some became the basis to the artwork in the ‘Cultivating the Community’ exhibition in the MK Gallery Project Space, September 2018. Having completed my community arts engagement, l felt my personal art journey had reached a stage of breakdown, transformation, and regeneration, aligning with the season of winter.
the BUILD
I am now preparing and nurturing an idea, that explores the value of ‘things’ within my environment, and what they mean to me, and how I let go of them, in order to make physical and mental space to move on. By using old drawings, marks I have made in the past, I re- cycle them re-using their marks and re-forming them into something more tangible, I can create a different mark. Drawings will be transformed into paper-mâché bricks, each brick will represent a unit of time, energy, and have a particular value attributed to it, they will mark a point in my artistic progress. As the bricks get created, and grow in numbers, their collective presence becomes greater than their individual parts, changing the focus, and introducing a new discourse. Together, the bricks will form a line, a line that becomes a wall, one that raises questions on the significance of the physical, and subconscious barriers, and boundaries that get constructed around us, and providing a actual wall to breakdown and rebuild.
