Ground

In May 2020 I bought manual soil corer, a tool widely used to take soil samples at varying depths for analysis and research. I am absorbed by the thought that under our feet is a material of such extraordinary complexity. We have yet to understand the languages of the soil.

Many of the new works began with the core samples that I collected from the garden. In all I collected over five hundred and found I could take samples up to a depth of 150 cm.

It took around four weeks for each core to dry completely. As they dried, the cores became a material to study and the work evolved from this close observation. I wanted to draw out their language by investigating the material, to find ways to construct forms. It was a relationship between me and the soil from my garden; a collaboration of languages. 

The cores have a beauty, each one slightly different in structure and composition. They are like maps of a slow evolution over time. They probably held evidence of works I had made in the same soils over the decades in that garden.

The work was constructed, over a period of nearly two years, in my basement studio that is at the same level as the garden. I was constantly moving between the two spaces. Initially I worked with the cores as elements of a larger work, simply drying and stacking them into a mound that held all the languages; a kind of library or archive of an essential material. 

The dried stack of cores became the material substrate of the work. I crushed and filtered some cores, I removed small stones and filtered the soil over and again until I had a fine pigment or powder. This powder was combined with shredded text to form leaves of a book like structure; a library of sorts. Some sixty-seven books were made from the cores. As each book was constructed I took any surplus material and squeezed it between cupped hands; a kind of ritual that denoted a charting of each element forming a flow of spheres.

Further pigments evolved as I filtered elements from the surface of the garden. Ranging form near black to pink each pigment was drawn into the work.

The work can be viewed as a landscape or garden of a relationship; a response to a material that sits below the surface informing what sits above. The work is a sculptural text that reflects and connects the space between the garden and the studio; a space of collaborative translations; each pile, stack and sphere holding meanings of an intuitive process which can become a language.