31/01/2018 - DRAWING WORKSHOP - INTERVENTION - ORGANIC

For our 'Intervention' drawing workshop, we discussed the ways in which artists affect and intervene with environments to shock and interrupt audiences out of complacency or expectation. This was one of the last drawing workshops of the year, and took place much later for me that 'Visual Scaffold' had in year one. Because of this I had tried to think of some preparatory ideas ahead of the workshop, and I had already been inspired by the ways in which nature is able to intervene and overtake urbanised areas in subtle ways. The ways in which moss grows between crack in brickwork, or a tuft of fragile grass pushes as if by magic through inches of thick solid asphalt. They remind us that, although we have invented many materials, and built many great structures, in the end everything is subsumed back in to nature, and in doing this we only temporarily deny our inescapable contract with the carbon cycle. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

In the workshop, I started by sketching areas of the room we were in, and transposing garden flowers onto these sterile white spaces. I chose a hydrangea, firstly because of their attractiveness of butterflies and other flying insects, but aso because of how the colour of the flowers varies depending on the acidity and aluminium content of soil at their location. "Not all plants are able to grow in acidic soil, primarily due to aluminum toxicity; the metal interferes with the nutrient uptake. Some plants, including hydrangea, have adapted to grow in acidic soils by either excluding aluminum or inactivating its toxicity. Hydrangea is the latter, “aluminum accumulator” type. By incorporating the metal as an aluminum-anthocyanin complex, the harmful effect of aluminum is held back, while giving the sepals a blue hue. Biochemistry is amazing!"

I also chose a foxglove, a prevalent wildflower in Britain which despite being decorative and visually impressive, are also highly poisonous and causes massive heart slowing and attack. Conversely to this the exact same poisoning element in Foxgloves has also been used as both a diruetic, and also to control heartrate in victims of heart failure. It is a perfect example of the complexities of nature, and defies human interpretation with a multitude of hidden, yet still incredibly important and fundementally dangerous to ignore, meanings and applications.

Next we had to take to the streets to find inspiration for further intervention from public spaces. As all of my work reaches public intervention stage eventually, I was less interested in discovering new sites for intervention, and instead wanted to discover areas where nature itself was intervening. These points were incredibly interesting to me, as these areas are places of uneasy collaboration between the manmade and natural. These are not ornamental, planted flowers, but weeds or ornamentals blown as seeds into spots just large enough for roots to take hold.

Ultimately these interventions become gradually destructive, as the architecture they permeate eventually becomes weakened and destabilised by creeping stem and root systems, and allow water into the fabric of building materials, as well as trapping moisture and detritus from rainwater runoff. However there is something subtly anarchic about the gradual, gentle invasion. I was also surprised to see, even though it was winter, it appeared that some of these plants had produced flowers in the warmer months. Our tutor for the activity likened this to guerilla gardening, however there is a particular disonnance in this concept.

Guerilla gardening is very much a human ideal wherein public spaces are reclaimed with food or decorative plants, humans claiming back land from bigger, more powerful human insitutions as activism, protest or beautification. The whole idea of guerilla gardening lies within our ideals of human territories and land owrnership, yet to compare that to the act of a stem of grass pushing it's way up through the pavement is like likening the fine-tuned hunt of a pride of lions over their home territory of decades, to a lone white western-world human hunter with a large hunting rifle and a land rover.

Yes, we have the tools and the options to do it as humans, with human tools and human context, but nature is the undeniable ultimate of all the guerrilla gardeners, at the end of the day it is the one massive garden of nature that we call planet Earth. It is important to appreciate these subtle acts of reclamation for what they are, and not try to impose human acts of protest onto them, as Nature is not planting these things here to subvert, or undermine any human system or authority. The wind is sowing these seeds atop this buildings and in the cracks and crevices and the rain and sunlight from these vantage points helps them grow, purely because that is the great system of life we live within. It is very much a typical human trait to rationalise this wild growth practice down into a form of casual organic protest through the lens of human understanding, much as a large amount of the literature I am currently reading also discusses.
 
These plants are not reminders of a breakaway from human systems, or subtle nods to life going on beyond urban environments. This IS the life going on, not only beyond and within urban environments, but everywhere in the entire world, constantly. Before us, after us, within us and around us. Intervention at it's most fundemental, biological and undeniable.

The final task of the activity was to propose our own interventions from the material we had gathered. So in preperation for this I tried to find some ground level areas which felt similar to areas from which I had witnessed plants bursting forth. Alleyways, or edges of buildings which provide shelter from the wind, and flat, relatively undisturbed areas, enough to allow new seeds to build up in leaf litter and settle for long enough to secure themselves with roots. One of the example locations I photographed was in the small alleyway on St. Andrews Street near the uni.

I was also thinking about the mural works of Mona Caron who supersizes weeds to exalt their status as a pest species. Her work deals with exactly the same themes as my photographic exploration, and also combines them with stop motion animation, to actually give them the power of movement and illusion of life.

With my opaque POSCA acrylic pens, I transposed enlarged versions of highly recognisable and iconic British flowering plants onto these environments. Their height really lent themselves to the areas I had photographed, which made the scale seem instantly more jarring and almost intimidating, in a very bright and inoffensive way. To see plants such as these supersized in such a way enhanced their otherness and unsettles the sense of the mundane which pervades functional city centres and busy highstreets.

I thought these ideas and experiments were very effective. I had played with ideas of changing scale in my large painting for the 'Balance' exhibition, and also read about Henri Rousseau's naive experiments with scale and exotic otherness in Jungles in Paris for my essay. From these sources it is becoming clear that scale can be another way to disrupt the power balance of man over nature, especially when coupled with unexpected intervention in the functional urban concrete sphere. This is definitely something I think I could explore further to great effect.