‘Quadrats’ will be one of the three new bodies of works I am making for ‘Fool’s Gold’.
The square structures will be formed from discarded ‘sticks’. From the the streets I have collected abandoned mop poles, rusty poles, brass poles, electrical casing, and various wooden frames.
I am cleaning and sanding them, safe for a gallery within a museum setting. I flip from welcoming them back as usable objects, to imagining them as a raw material, found on the ground like a rock to be chiselled or a fallen tree to be carved.
As I curate and group them together – I am arguing out the desire to make them new and fresh with a coat of paint.
Instead I am drawn to bringing out the aesthetics that signify they are abandoned.
The scratches, dents, and stains.
Do I feel I have an affinity with the materials I use. Do I feel sorry for them, that they have become the abandoned. What do I see in these materials – what looks back at me. Are they – us? Our relationship with each other, with the planet – with dying ecosystems?
Quadrats are a tool used in ecology to sample the average amount of a species in a habitat.
My ‘Quadrats’ will act as viewfinders, framing our confused relationship with ‘nature’.
