Mixed media installation, November 2019, The Exchange, Erith

The works in the exhibition, made in my living room and back garden in Woolwich, consider gardening (in its broadest sense, perhaps simply time spent with plants) as a form of creative practice and expression. The project took inspiration from the writings of ‘plant philosophers’ Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, in particular their collaborative book Through Vegetal Being. Both the digital video and the series of multi-exposure images evoke the necessity of breath, which immersion in plant life facilitates. Through that immersion the usual boundaries between interior and exterior are dissolved. And, perhaps, in mindful encounters with nature, we can find models for living – with ourselves and with others. 

In the series of black and white images each ‘Inhale/Exhale’ was made by multiple exposure: a single taken inside, overlaid with a further two taken outside. The video is an extension of this process. Attaching a video camera and mic to my body, I kept them there over the course of a hot midsummer afternoon taking photographs. Along with ambient sound (music on the radio, birdsong, focus and shutter release…) the audio captures my own breath — as I repeat the actions of laying out letters; walking from inside to outside and back; bending, leaning and pausing to compose the shots. Video and audio were separated, and audio overlaid into spliced multiple tracks (or ‘exposures’).

“It is true that being born requires one to breathe by oneself. Instead of teaching me how to cultivate my breathing, my culture had taught me how to suspend my breath in words, ideas or ideals – something that led me to breathe in an artificial way and left me breathless…” (Irigiray, p.20)

“After passing the threshold, which in my case, assumed the shape of a ground-level window, we can no longer resort to artificially constructed limits, boundaries or walls, whether conceptual or physical, for delimiting life. On the hither side, a single tree is already an ensemble of multiple growths: divergent and interweaving trunks; the moss or the ivy that covers the branches and a squirrel that climbs them.” (Marder, p.150)

“Perhaps I could say that the vegetal world had become a mothering place that provided me with the air I needed. However, I was no longer a foetus. I not longer received air with the maternal blood through the umbilical cord and the mediation of placenta. I was already born and had to breathe by myself. It was the vegetal world that ensured mothering care with the environment it arranged around me.” (Irigiray, p.21)

“Outside, in a back yard or in a garden, a richer sense of one’s body, as much as of one’s thinking, is also achieved in contact with the other, with the elements and the vegetal world.” (Marder, p.152)

“My sense was that if everything happened more slowly and that in that deceleration, which facilitated a closer attention to plants and to the elements, living became more vibrant. Time and again, time was gained for life.” (Marder, p.160)