Studio work, rough ideas and experiments. I spent this week making images, thinking about attention and process. And considering the question below.
How might an image making process translate my knowledge and attention to a garden I tend?
I wanted to use found materials for the collage, and rather than making imagery that materially related to paper craft, print or drawing I was keen to see what could come of using material from the site I was making images about: the plants, soil and other life in the shared garden where I live. This is a garden that my partner and I mostly tend, but that we share with others who live in our building and use it in other ways: playing, football, drying washing, sunning their pot plants.
Befor collecting material I took some quick, up close photos of the garden, mostly to give some idea of what is growing there and without having to show a full picture of it. To give a sense of the textures and layers and close enough that material might be recognised from the collages.
I collected plant material and other objects I found in the garden beds, often there is debris in the soil from previous tenants, foxes, wind blowing trash around etc. This was collected in late September after a period of drought and a summer of heatwaves. The ground was parched, plants suffering, although most made it through the heat even with our minimal hand watering schedule for our edibles.
I collected the material from weeds I have cultivated or encouraged in the garden to improve the soil and diversify the large patch of lawn; plant material that was diseased particularly purple oxalis with rust; dried seeds heads and dead plant material as that is one of the harvests of the time of year.
I laid out the material in the following ways:
To show the soil improving plants: red clover, wide leaved plantain, narrow leaved plantain and buckshorn plantain (all the plantain is edible, and the buckshorn is particularly delicious, as it has been cultivated for eating).
To show the trash and diseased elements. You can more clearly see the colouration from the LED light I was using, giving a striped effect. These images were taken with a Lumix digital camera as the sunlight was receding. I chose to photograph these ‘collages’ so that I could keep iterating on them. However I found that that open ended-ness prevented me from being able to judge what was happening very well. Although I think some of these images are appealing I am not convinced they are doing much.
A range of material all at once, focused on the interplay of forms for composition, rather than trying to ‘say’ anything informative through grouping. Groupings still become visible to me even in these messier images, but I’m unsure how that translates for others.
I then made some images of these collages through one of the viewfinders I’d made previously.
Lastly I used glue to stick down some of the more malleable and flat plant material and see how this organic matter responded. The below collages are scans made several days after making. Much of the material was already decomposing or was dried, however the green leaves have withered considerably and you can see how they gather or fold around the glued down areas.
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