ECOTOPE (2019-2024)
“We all carry trace fossils within us - the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace - and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.” Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey
One of my earliest memories is climbing up the clay slopes along the Jurassic Coast in Devon with my father, digging for fossils. A shoreline which around 200 million years ago was entirely submerged by a tropical sea. I must have been around three or four years old. The other memory is of climbing up into the attic in our family home, stepping through the rafters, to find the wooden box belonging to my father from his childhood. The lid would slide out and in it a number of eggs would be revealed, carefully placed in a bed of shredded paper, stolen from various nests climbing trees as a little boy. The eggs have since disintegrated and the fossils long lost, but the sense of wonder in these discoveries of the natural world has never left me and I hold it as the greatest gift.
I began Ecotope in the summer of 2019 on residency in Upstate New York. Torrential rain and unable to make work outside, I returned to a studio practice from twenty years prior. Marjory’s World and Cutting Sequence projects, took window treatments from people’s homes out into the landscape. Ecotope took fly screen and nailed to the wall of the studio. In to out, out to in, everything always seems to mimic the breath.
Ecotope on an anthropological level, is a meditation upon the layering of time and of deep time. Since before we were Homo sapiens, humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning. The Chauvet cave in southern France, widely considered the world’s greatest repository of Upper Paleolithic art, together with over 400 drawings reveals footprints thousands of years old, impressed into the now hardened clay floor, traces left behind.
The Norwegian painted sea caves, the only recorded examples of their kind in Northern Europe, comprising 12 sites depicting 170 painted figures are located in a desolate marginal area along the Atlantic coast. Made by hunter-gatherer-fishers during the Bronze age, the majority of the works are found in the deepest and darkest areas of the caves, areas where the sounds and light of the outside world are replaced by darkness and silence. The walls would have been perceived as a highly charged, spiritual phenomenon, a ‘living membrane,’ behind which existed the spirit world; Painting onto these would have enabled connections with the supernatural.
“Mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity.” Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
Ecotope on a physiological level, is a developmental and relational study. The diameters of the two largest circles in each work indicate my height and my daughter’s as she measures at the time I begin making a new piece. Both diameters will change as she grows and I contract, a living layer to the work and a record of the two of us as we move through the years. The third and smallest circular form in each work at 19 inches diameter remains constant, it is her height at birth and marks the exact length at time of entry. In the future, the series of works if viewed in chronological order, will map this growth and contain an encoded story. The interplay of geometrical forms a corollary to this foundational and evolutional subtext.
ecotope : "the particular portion […] of the physical world that forms a home for the organisms which inhabit it" - Arthur Tansley, 1939 …."the smallest spatial object or component of a geographical landscape" - Carl Troll, 1945
I am interested in concepts of emergent strategy, cellular memory and our relationship with the natural world. Patterns of cellular growth and division speaking to an underlying order and harmony working within set proportional limitations. Experiential in nature, the moray created with the layers of the fly screen is activated as the viewer moves around the piece. Alive and in constant flux, the works speak to the fabric of our being, the layering of experience and the Law of Impermanence. In the layering there is a necessary economy, too many layers and the black becomes dense and static and in this restriction a clarification occurs, an awareness. It is an active way of working and requires a softness, a tending; in it’s translucency the mesh has a transient trace like quality, much like breath and light, both elements which the screen itself, in it’s utility, has been designed to filter.
“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Nick Obolensky
SUN BREATHING (2017-2019)
The observation and charting of biological rhythms is a recurrent theme in my work and these pictures were taken over the course of one summer in Upstate New York.
The series takes its title from the recently discovered atmospheric phenomenon induced by the sun, of the rhythmic expansion and contraction of Earth’s atmosphere on a nine-day cycle. This ‘breathing’ corresponds to changes in the sun’s magnetic fields as it completes rotations once every 27 days.
Man’s quest to understand and map his physical environment has resulted in the development over centuries of a cartographic system. Dots dating to 14,500 BC have been found on the walls of the Lascaux caves mapping out part of the night sky. Contour lines used to describe a land’s surface were used as early as 1746. Experimentations as early as 1870 in illuminating contour lines to help visualize terrain were made, but it was not until 1950 when the Tanaka (Relief) Contours technique was developed, that lines highlighted or shaded depending on their relationship to a light source in the Northwest, were employed in the cartographic methodology.
The series of pictures titled Through Looking (2015 -), using a window blind, a common household object, seemed to allude to this cartographic system. By placing the blind in the landscape itself, the viewer’s gaze was led to the landscape beyond by looking through this portal like object, replicating the act of viewing through a window. The topographic nature, and the visual experience of such, was addressed in a new way. The grid like form activated the scene, the network of lines served as a tool for arranging and organizing the information. It imparted a democratic character to the composition, a demarcation of space into numerous equal units engaging the entire surface area, the edges becoming as important as the centre. The tendency of our visual system, to simplify a scene into the main object and the background, according to figure-ground perception, was challenged.
Sun Breathing continued these experiments in perceptual experience. Working in the en plein air method as in the earlier series, I painted the blinds in situ ‘mapping’ a given area with a grid form, but the practice began to evolve from painting onto an object within the landscape into using the landscape itself as the surface on which to paint. I was now charting the contours of the foliage with my hand as I painted it.
A dialogue developed between the resulting pairs of images, a study in contrasts, the same scene both with and without the blind, the dichotomy of control and release. I began to realize that the inherent binary nature in the very act of breathing was being echoed. The experience of being absolutely present with the immersion in nature was akin to the mindfulness practice of focusing on the breath. In the words of Indian scholar T. Krishnamacharya: Inhale, and God approaches you. Hold the inhalation and God remains with you. Exhale, and you approach God. Spending many hours alone in the landscape while I have made these pictures has always felt very much a communion both with nature and with spirit.
Visible light, also known as white light, consists of a collection of component colors – ROYGBIV. The three colors red, yellow and blue being the common set of primary colors, often used in painting, seemed to be the appropriate starting point of enquiry. The color served as a connector between the pairs of images, transferring it from the blind in one image onto the landscape in the other. In painting the landscape however, the color processing and color-memory association functions of the brain were confused. Landscapes are not typically these primary colors and so the form of the topography was experienced in a new way.
I have come to understand in my practice that I have been as much a portal as the window props themselves. As I have made work in response to this experience, my hope has been that these pictures will serve to engage the viewer in much the same way. To share that sense of wonder and of beauty and of ultimately coming home, to our true natural state. The pivoting of these rigid slats to reveal a landscape beyond is very much a metaphor for the human condition; Like gills giving life, allowing air, they are allowing vision. A shifting of perception leading to a new way of seeing.
MARJORY'S WORLD - THROUGH LOOKING - CUTTING SEQUENCE - (2012-2024)
..it occurs to me that at one time, the only acceptable expression of profound grief for ladies of the upper classes was to wear heavy robes of black silk taffeta or black crepe de chine and Sir Thomas Browne who was the son of a silk merchant, and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudoxica Epidemica, that in the Holland of his time, it was customary in a home where there had been a death - to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors, and all canvases depicting landscapes or people, or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body would not be distracted on its final journey. Either by a reflection of itself or a last glimpse of the land - now being lost for ever.
W.G.Sebald, The Rings of Saturn