Woolgathering

Wool Gathering is generally regarded to be a fruitless pursuit but if you examine the etymology of the idiom you will that this must not have originally been the case as the activity is goal oriented and required concentration. Wordsworth provides a description of children engaged with it in the poem 'intent on gathering wool from hedge and brake' and states that 'a poor old Dame will bless them for the boon' so as late as 1798 this was an activity that had some value. This is an apposite metaphor for the act of making and the work that sits at the end of the process. Starting with an inkling rather than an intention feelings, thoughts, influences and images are gathered and presented to arrive at something that presents as one thing and could easily be another making attempts at definition difficult. The work is about this and also about that. This work in particular begins in, and is about, a garden. Gardens have an association with the notion of Englishness and have been intertwined with the politics of the time since William Kent created the garden at Chiswick House in the early 18th century. The English garden is intimately associated with class divisions and the notions of land and property. An Englishman's home is far more his garden than his castle. I spend a lot of time in my garden attempting to be guided by it to create a haven of sorts. In 'The Garden Against Time' Olivia Laing writes about the restoration of a garden, delving into its history and the forces around it that shape that history. She writes “ ...I was exhausted by the perpetual, agonised now of the news. I didn't just want to journey backwards through the centuries. I wanted to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness. I had an inkling even then that the gardener is initiated into a different understanding of time, which might also have a bearing on how to preclude the apocalypse we seem bent on careering into. I wanted to dig down, and see what I could find. A garden contains secrets, we all know that, buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world.” It is a fascinating book drawing on notions of the garden from Milton's Paradise Lost through John Clare and the ravages of enclosure and even to Iris Origo's war diary from la Foce, 'War in Val d'Orcia' with all the diversions you would imagine and never shirking the moral ambiguity at the heart of all interactions with the land. That idea of connecting to everything through a seemingly solitary activity is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with 'woolgathering'. I explore the way we manipulate 'our' piece of land and how it manipulates us. Gardens allow us to acquire some virtues, like patience and wonder, but they simultaneously reinforce our insularity and affirm our connection to what we think of as belonging exclusively to us. I start with drawing, or I start with building or I start with reading but I always start with a direction and no discernible destination. The drawings become sculptures, the reading becomes drawing, the sculptures are drawn again and the drawings built again and through the process I arrive somewhere and find a way to put a viewer into that place. This work looks at how we inhabit spaces using this combination of traditional and digital media. Suppose the imagination is a territory where there are no maps and the viewer is faced with charting their own course, exploring in a way that suits them and exercising agency in the encounter. The viewer finds themselves in a suburban garden and is able to explore this without restriction. At certain points they are transported to another space and asked to wander here too. Virtual Reality allows me to explicitly give agency to the audience so that the story is theirs rather than mine. I invite them to spend a few moments in the garden and move away from the everyday to different kind of time.