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My relationship with the land is one of activism, but also of intimacy. I imagined what gifts the woods would grow over me if I lay myself down in the forest, what strength the natural world would lend me to defend myself, to defend it. This work is a ritual garment, worn performatively and privately to work with the land and myself.
This work is the development of a journey that began as an exploration of identity, memory, landscape and burden. I set out with the intention to explore the tangibility and intangibility of experience, to create a wearable object that offered the wearer both the discomfort and privilege of burden. I hoped to visually explain my relationship with the natural world, where we are both mother and daughter.
This final outcome is the expression of fundamental tenants that have run through my practice like roots through groundwater. The first page of my sketchbook contains a copy of the poem, Fertile Land, which I wrote in Scotland in 2018 during my odyssey from Land’s End to John o’Groats. I imagined a long-dead Lady Macbeth crawling from her grave back to the highlands, dismayed to find them ruined by human greed and destruction; she reconciles her child-loss by using her body to birth new flowers to the earth, using her flesh to nourish the land.
Walking in the woods by the forge, I saw a tiny branch draped with delicate lichen. I immediately saw it in my mind’s eye as the plant’s arm, wearing the lichen like adornment or armour. I imagined what ‘armour’ the woods would grow over me if I lay myself down in the forest, what tenets of strength the natural world would lend me to defend myself, to defend it?
This work is a ritual garment, worn performatively and privately to work with the land and myself, the weight of that work reflected in the weight of the forged object. I have been untangling the ritual symbolism of my work from the embedded ritual of making itself. In covering my breasts
