These works - Encircle and Hemicircle explore the emotionally conflicting territories of belonging and grief within geographical locations of enclosure and ruination.
Made in the period immediately after my father’s death, they respond to my connection to land and him, specifically a remote location above the River Dart on Dartmoor. Hemicircle is a five part text that describes a frantic run and collapse to this place and the poignant and visual motifs experienced during the journey. It utilises the form of ‘blind’ acid-etched embossing to transcribe a piece written from a place of raw bereavement into a braille-like, lifted text, at times legible, and at others secret.
Encircle evokes an ancient shape found in this location and many others on the moor, a hut-circle or animal pound, traces of which are only legible through the gorse crowning the ancient walls. Translated in the gallery into sculptural form, the gorse invites, embraces and protects, yet fights and scratches. The shifting states of both pieces emulate the unruly waves of grief, slipping quickly between emotions like wonder and fury.
That these pieces are made in response to Dartmoor necessarily invokes the recent furore over the right to roam and the ongoing separation of people from land enacted through the enclosures act and the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Human traces on Dartmoor made through centuries’ worth of agriculture, imprisonment and industry become hard to interpret when covered with furze or gorse, they become indexical marks in the landscape, raised letters that maybe we can read, but perhaps we have lost that skill.
That we have forgotten how could be a source of grief, but perhaps there is still comfort on offer, perhaps our bodies still know how, perhaps they are still drawn to the embrace of the land.
Made in the period immediately after my father’s death, they respond to my connection to land and him, specifically a remote location above the River Dart on Dartmoor. Hemicircle is a five part text that describes a frantic run and collapse to this place and the poignant and visual motifs experienced during the journey. It utilises the form of ‘blind’ acid-etched embossing to transcribe a piece written from a place of raw bereavement into a braille-like, lifted text, at times legible, and at others secret.
Encircle evokes an ancient shape found in this location and many others on the moor, a hut-circle or animal pound, traces of which are only legible through the gorse crowning the ancient walls. Translated in the gallery into sculptural form, the gorse invites, embraces and protects, yet fights and scratches. The shifting states of both pieces emulate the unruly waves of grief, slipping quickly between emotions like wonder and fury.
That these pieces are made in response to Dartmoor necessarily invokes the recent furore over the right to roam and the ongoing separation of people from land enacted through the enclosures act and the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Human traces on Dartmoor made through centuries’ worth of agriculture, imprisonment and industry become hard to interpret when covered with furze or gorse, they become indexical marks in the landscape, raised letters that maybe we can read, but perhaps we have lost that skill.
That we have forgotten how could be a source of grief, but perhaps there is still comfort on offer, perhaps our bodies still know how, perhaps they are still drawn to the embrace of the land.
