Photo series. Collected images from the UK, Ireland and Austria.
I remain fascinated [and gently encouraged] by how often I come across these unsanctioned route-ways across our predetermined urban landscapes.
Somehow, for all the formality and domesticity of our modern lives, the rules, regulations, the control,… our feet, and our will, know something of where they want to go and will not be contained by concrete or fences nor the ideas and rules that set them in place. Something in us knows better, and with or without consciousness of it, we will tread the routes we wish, our desire lines.
Despite our long time urbanised lives, it still seems to come naturally to us to find the direct routes we wish to go. I see something here of our instinctive wildness as creatures with ancestors that have walked the wild earth for hundreds of thousands of years, long before borders and boundaries were laid down. And I take heart at the ease at which we subtly disobey modern conventions, and for all our distance from the lives of our ancestors who walked without human imposed conditions, know our instinct and wish to walk the earth as if it were without so many of our modern constraints. I take heart at this action, that our earth connecting capacities we see here in these desire lines may also not be lost, but perhaps only dormant. That some part of us at least remains part wild.
Inner and outer pathways through the hardened forms of contemporary society.
Emerging image series of camps I have found in the woodlands [and parks] of the UK.
The building of these wild camps is another phenomena that, for all the techno domesticity of our world today, seems to speak of an enduring wildness in us and its sustained call.
I like to observe the simple hand worked creativity of their build, the choices made on how to shape the structure, the branches chosen, the imagining of how to bed down, but also of the places chosen, the clearings and hidden spaces. Where does this impulse to build them come from? What is it about?
I think many of them are made by kids, which I find also fascinating - does it perhaps reveal some kind of instinctive urge or deep subconscious memory of the necessity to make shelter, to know ourselves alive in the wild, living within ‘nature’, as a part of our landscape?
I find it good to recognise these instinctive urges and acts that somehow prevail, seemingly without particular necessity in a techno domesticated world, but nonetheless revealing of something of our deeper nature.
A collection of signs taken down from their positions defining ‘boundaries of separation’ of enclosed land, woodland and privatised places across the UK and Austria.
We are entirely used to our land, woodland, rivers and most places to be defined as public, or private. Ownership, whether of land, property or object is without question a completely normal and fundamental concept that underpins how we live. But it has not always been like this. The worldview of indigenous cultures across the world today, and indeed of our own indigenous ancestors here in the UK, have different understandings about the ‘ownership’ of land, about the human as a part of ‘nature’, and of how ‘inner’ mind is woven into ‘outer’ world.
I have been long interested in the British story of land ownership, the progression of enclosure that has gradually eroded the commons over a thousand years and all the immediate injustices that have come with it to the point today where only 8% of England is openly accessible to its citizens. But I am intrigued by how far this story of separation goes and how many layers there are to it. Enclosure of wild and common land into private ownership. A progressive separation of humans from nature. A separation of self from other, both human and non-human. But it runs deeper still, enmeshing itself into the reductionist assumptions of Rene Descartes’s separation of the thinking mind, or subject, from the material world of things, or objects. Reductionist assumptions that still dominate our thought systems today.
I have found these signs we see fixed up everywhere fascinating on so many levels. It is entirely normal and completely accepted that this is the way of things: Private Land = NO ENTRY. But these signs enforce more than simply the boundary of ‘private’ land, woods or ‘property’… they enforce a worldview - that says that humans are separate from nature, separate from ecosystems, separate from each other, and that our ‘inner’ thoughts and images are separate from the ‘outer’ phenomena of the world.
In a time of rapidly escalating climate crisis, we need to make significant changes, right now. As we learn more each year about the value of rewilding land to stabilise and enrich ecosystems to be at their most climate resilient, it is my feeling that we need to equally attend to the rewilding of the human. To embed ourselves once more in nature, with all the direct proven benefits to health of mind, body, family and community, and with the extension that once we feel nature connected, we understand better and are motivated for planetary care. And that with this comes a deeper rewilding of our understanding of who and what we are, of our perception. In taking action on the crisis in the climate it seems important to recognise that it has far reaching roots in the crisis in our perception.
I am so reassured to see the resilience and creativity of nature, how rapidly and imaginatively it reclaims the human civilised world.
Up through the cracks in concrete, forcing itself through asphalt, climbing over recently vacated buildings, venturing into covid locked down cities…. the life force and pure will of nature takes its opportunity the moment human attention lapses.
I find it so reassuring. And it speaks in us too.
Joseph Beuys had a Theory of Sculpture where any material, whether a physical material or a psychological or social material, could be in one of 3 states. A fluid or chaotic state, and a hardened or solid state. Materials could change state, if worked with in certain ways, be they clay or a social phenomena. But they also could become stuck in their state. He also talked of warmth work and this was a central principle of many of his actions and interventions, whereby as artist he was an agent that could warm up hardened forms, and bring flexibility, malleability to forms that had become hardened. Social Sculpture translates as Sozial plastik in German, where ‘sculpture’ holds something of the word plastic, or malleable.
Here is a collection of images I have gathered largely in the UK of the British obsession to try and stop children playing, by erecting signs that command ‘No Playing’, ‘No Skateboarding’, ‘No Busking’, particularly it seems in the very places that are exactly the right places in which to play.
I find them extraordinary. They are everywhere. Something is stuck, hardened, in a society that finds these so necessary. Hardened forms, that definitely need warming up.
Image series of abandoned fire places found on wild land of the UK and Austria.
I am intrigued by these abandoned fire places I come across, that seem to speak of unnoticed things, ancient traces made visible.
They reveal our 400,000 year fascination, our need, to be with fire, to make it ourselves, to shape the hearth with our hands, a ring of stones, a dug hollow in the earth, shaped until we are content, the wood gathered, kindling made, the fire breathed into life and carefully tended… the ancient ritual has important process, and these traces reveal our unique attention and familiarity with them.
And there is the location, the place of the fire, where we choose to locate this ritual, by rivers, in forest clearings, under a grand tree, a beach with a view. Wild places. And set with an aspect, vantage point, or sense of shelter. Again, important parts of this fire ritual process with which, as modern domesticated humans we remain instinctively familiar with. We know how we want the fire and place to be.
We wish to be in the wild. To be away from the civilised. And under cover of night we are not contained by the permissions or requirements of civilisation, we are in touch with something deeper, older, that needs to live in us. The wild.
Despite how little connection we have to the distant traditions of our indigenous ancestry, somehow, we still have desire, need, to make a fire place and gather, sit, cook and gaze into a wild fire. Almost as if upholding an unrecognised ancient lineage, a part of ourselves that needs to be known, re-wilded, and cannot be left to fade.
I created this piece 'thought bridge' during the high summer heat in southern Austria. Over a few days I sought out the cool and shade of the forest to work with my hands and a few simple tools to get to know the forest / myself more closely through its making.
Social Sculpture's expanded conception of art refers to connective aesthetics, of art being a connective practice, helping us to tune into deeper aspects of ourselves, of thought, ideas and also of the world around us. These ideas have helped me make sense of the art making process. I feel myself enter a different mode of being, engaged, focused, more fluid and reflective, attentive to inner senses, feelings and impulses and how they intertwine with the physicality of finding, collecting, placing and shaping of objects and the environment of the outer world. A deeper more intuitive intelligence begins to emerge to accompany the more assertive rational modes the world usually asks of me. I begin to feel closer to the forest around me and the forest more present in me. I can begin to wonder where I begin and the forest ends.
Zen Master Thich Naht Hahn, speaks of our need to go beyond talking about ‘the environment’ as this leads people to experience themselves and the earth as two separate entities. Social Sculpture, drawing on J.W von Goethe, considers that we need to develop 'new organs of perception' to help us understand ourselves and our world in a more connected way. It understands our imagination to be an ‘organ of perception’ and that if we can awaken our attention to it and find ways to cultivate it, we could come to know ourselves and our world in a new, more connected way.
The climate crisis is demanding we make some enormous changes to the way we act in the world. We need to really look deeply to consider where these changes need to be. The roots of the climate crisis spring from our very sense of separation from ‘our environment’, indeed from the very concept of ‘the environment’. This dualistic mode of thinking and its emphasis on rational thought, has disconnected us from ourselves, each other and the earth. We have an inner climate crisis that is intimately entwined with an outer climate crisis. If we do not attend to this ‘crisis in our perception’ as we go about responding to the screaming urgency of the changing biosphere, we may find we have no real solutions. We do indeed need 'system change not climate change' - but what does this really mean and how is our very thinking involved in creating the problem in ways we may not, from our cultures' more rational disconnected mode, have seen.
Endorsing the calls of Joseph Beuys, of the potential of art to transform society, I feel there is more at work in our urges to 'engage creatively' to the challenges of climate change than we may have at first considered. At work in the woods, and doing my best to awaken to the impulses of imagination, I find a warm comfortable familiarity, it is new, but not only and I am wondering how close this sense may be to how our ancestors may have felt living very closely, and connected, to the ecosystem that they were woven intimately into. Thought bridge has been an alchemical process, grown from these questionings of our disconnection and what may be involved in building bridges of connection once more.
Exhibition + connected live happenings:
Opening: 3 May. 19-22.
Exhibition: 3-14 May, Daily 10-18. come for coffee. (7,8 May closed/ we are mobile @Donau Festival) + open for evening events/ check programme. Facebook event page.
Dia-logos; Dialogues. 1:1/ small groups/ with the artist/ with coffee/ every day. 10-12 & 16-18. / Sorry/ meine deutsch ist nicht so gute/ mostly in English.
Dia-logos; Wider Forum. All welcome. Sat 14 May. 11-14. With snacks/ coffee. English / German mix.
Kapitalismus Tribunal. 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 May. 12-17. Live streamed screening from the court to exhibition. Mo.ë’s charge against capitalism presented 6 May. Eigentum im Kapitalismus.
Ways in / Ways out. 4 May. 18-20. Guided tour of mo.ë’s alternative entrances and exits. Protective clothing and torches will be provided! With Michi Weidhofer.
Donau festival. 7 May. We will be mobile at the festival with street actions and a space for dialogues,… art, society, capitalism… and airlines sponsoring arts festivals!
Goldshift. 12-14 May.
Salon Flux/ OPEN HOUSE; Sat 14 May. 17-22.
A collection of signs taken down from their positions defining ‘boundaries of separation’ of enclosed land, woodland and privatised places across the UK and Austria.
We are entirely used to our land, woodland, rivers and most places to be defined as public, or private. Ownership, whether of land, property or object is without question a completely normal and fundamental concept that underpins how we live. But it has not always been like this. The worldview of indigenous cultures across the world today, and indeed of our own indigenous ancestors here in the UK, have different understandings about the ‘ownership’ of land, about the human as a part of ‘nature’, and of how ‘inner’ mind is woven into ‘outer’ world.
I have been long interested in the British story of land ownership, the progression of enclosure that has gradually eroded the commons over a thousand years and all the immediate injustices that have come with it to the point today where only 8% of England is openly accessible to its citizens. But I am intrigued by how far this story of separation goes and how many layers there are to it. Enclosure of wild and common land into private ownership. A progressive separation of humans from nature. A separation of self from other, both human and non-human. But it runs deeper still, enmeshing itself into the reductionist assumptions of Rene Descartes’s separation of the thinking mind, or subject, from the material world of things, or objects. Reductionist assumptions that still dominate our thought systems today.
I have found these signs we see fixed up everywhere fascinating on so many levels. It is entirely normal and completely accepted that this is the way of things: Private Land = NO ENTRY. But these signs enforce more than simply the boundary of ‘private’ land, woods or ‘property’… they enforce a worldview - that says that humans are separate from nature, separate from ecosystems, separate from each other, and that our ‘inner’ thoughts and images are separate from the ‘outer’ phenomena of the world.
In a time of rapidly escalating climate crisis, we need to make significant changes, right now. As we learn more each year about the value of rewilding land to stabilise and enrich ecosystems to be at their most climate resilient, it is my feeling that we need to equally attend to the rewilding of the human. To embed ourselves once more in nature, with all the direct proven benefits to health of mind, body, family and community, and with the extension that once we feel nature connected, we understand better and are motivated for planetary care. And that with this comes a deeper rewilding of our understanding of who and what we are, of our perception. In taking action on the crisis in the climate it seems important to recognise that it has far reaching roots in the crisis in our perception.
fences
Installation of removed/ stolen sections of fencing - from city and country.
Part of the Alchemy of Eviction exhibition @ mo.ë, Vienna, 2016
Fences control free movement, of humans and animals, they lay claim to certain areas, control and determine what is and is not acceptable on each side and set a boundary of separation. Some have been shaped by mutual agreements and are fair and sensible to our common good, but some land has been unfairly enclosed or stolen over centuries by established power systems, preventing wider society accessing what was once common land.
We need to shape our world, and laying out lines and barriers can help us in this, but are these lines where they are most helpful or have they become stuck in old thought and power structures? Could they be more flexible, permeable or removed all together to help shape a new more open form for a more connected, accessible, trusting, equitable world.
The positioning of the fences and barriers out there in the world today are based on ideologies - ways of thinking, inner thought structures. So what are these and how are these held in place by these external barriers? If we shift a fence or boundary in the outer world, will we also work upon the internal boundaries that maintain our entrenched boundaries of separation? Or vice versa?
I built this over a wet week in April 2012, high on Dartmoor in Devon.
Thinking into the 'crisis in our perception' at the heart of our current ecological and social predicaments, I wanted to try and get beyond this perceptual crisis that our civilisation had given me.
I removed myself to a remote place. Being alone in wild weather, free from modern distractions, and working with as simple means as possible helped me to un-civilise myself and get closer to the earth and perhaps to how life may have been for our ancestors.
After I had found a site that felt a good place to build, and had got started, I discovered nearby that someone else had chosen the same area to build a circle of stone, but about 5000 years ago! How did these builders understand themselves and the earth? Did they have a crisis in perception?