Gatherers Exhibition 16.05–26.07.20 // A collaboration with OmVed Gardens and Thrown Contemporary

A collaboration by OmVed Gardens, Thrown and Metafleur (my new sustainable flowers venture), Gatherers was originally formed as part of the Chelsea Fringe Festival and with lockdown restrictions halting plans, the exhibition was re-thought for the digital sphere, presented through Virtual Reality, online workshops, film and photographs.

Using the medium of ceramics as a starting point, the exhibition includes wild clay projects that stretch from Tambourine Mountain, Australia, right back to OmVed Gardens itself. 

The ceramic work and exhibition content is further expanded by foraged floral displays from Metafleur. These include an intertwined collaborative wild garden installation by Metafleur’s founder Alice McCabe and ceramicist Zuleika Melluish on the central stage. With Alice’s usual suppliers suspended, Metafleur uses solely flowers dried from previous events together with materials from friends offcuts and materials. 

For more information about the images and all ceramic artists please see Gatherers.co

Cultivar Project 29.06.19 – 16.07.19 // Museum of The Flat Earth, Fogo Island

Cultivar Project 29.06.19 – 16.07.19 // Museum of The Flat Earth, Fogo Island

Having missed the opportunity to work and walk with Amy Ash last year in 2018, due to hostile environment of UK (see floral pilgrimage post) we secured a residency together on Fogo Island, an area in between the coasts we both currently look out from.

Our plan was to draw from physical exploration of the Islands flora and the metaphorical implications of botanical terminology, to explore botanical and cultural hybridization to connect political displacement, communities and nature using Amy’s experience of a hostile environment with new possibilities for future growth as a starting point.

From our base at the former Museum of the Flat Earth we got to work on the Island - card reading, dining at Cod-jigger, blackfly biting coastal exploration, workshop plotting and cyanotyping of our hybridised species:

Floral Pilgrimage yr III // #Blauwhaus Artist Residency, Belgium 25.04.19 - 17.05.19

www.blauwhaus.be

Absolute pleasure to be invited to this residency, exhibition, lecture and collaborative working space set up by Wim Wauman in a Castle in Waasmunster, green green Belgium. The project morphed from being a celebration of female arts and crafts makers / muses with him at the helm as Blue Beard to a working unit of craftspeople, with talks and tours organised exploring local history and Bauhaus ethos. Together we worked towards expanding the heraldic crest of Waasmunster - a mermaid holding a turnip - via many tangential connections found in The Wasteland / Waasland, hyperborea - land of eternal Spring and immortality, flat earth theory, colour blue, trees of heaven for presentation as a parade, featuring performance and installations on May 26th.

Powers of x 10 conceived of by animator Isabel Bouttons and droned by Melvin Vanderstylen at the May Day Picnic, 2019.

As part of the residency, I gave an introduction to my work as The Floral Pilgrim to students at The Academie of Waasmunster and invited class to create their own floral bouquet in a small cone to befit the Monster of Waasmunster, replacing the turnip with something more delectable.

Props for the Parade //

At the Academy I worked with glass sculptor Veerle Verschooren and tattoo artist / sculptor Cardon Lander; to create an illusion of a water source from one section of the groups communal table, with the idea of adding floral touches as an alternative well dressing. The small brown pots, designed to display grass blades are part of it. The full installation will only be revealed after the 26th ;)
The object on the right is a pipe, one of 8 made, hoping to plug in a gap at the Local Museum that has an extensive Happy Smokers display rack but a comparatively limited selection of pipes. These will then form part of an installation on a picnic blanket embroidered with group poem and Waasmonsters created by Ilse Van Roy. One pipe will hang on a walkingstick designated for Wim, designed and conceived of by Warre Mulder and Chantal van Rijt.

Daniel Ost, 2012 - Belgian Floral Art Superstar Installation - at the Roosenberg Abbey, Waasmunster.

Floral Pilgrimage III // The Dutch Flower Route _ What 👁️ Saw 22.04.19 - 25.04.19

The Flower Industry

Monday 22nd: Finding the Bluemenstrecke

Left from Folkestone with Liz and Carol, entered via freightlane, pulled over with an emergency stop and boarded train - France - Belge (picnic lunch in Flora!) - Haarlem / start of the Flower Route. Stayed lovely Air B’n’B where other guests mistaking my height for being Dutch owner kept telling me where they had left the keys.

The shut Pilgrim Museum in Leiden displaying it’s Dutch still life charm.

Tuesday 23rd: Keukenhof

Bluemenstrecke, bright fields behind the hedges; straight lines peeking round. Cut tulips for sale on the side of the road and rows rows of flowers being sprayed. Lunch in Leiden after dining out on feast, swathes of star, bulbs, grape hyacinth at Keukenhof “Mega Garden.” Night in Waaldwick: bedazzled by glasshouses, skies and skips of flowers.

Wednesday 25th: D I S C O

Visited Flora Holland / Flower Auction and entered the NO tourist zone. Serious forward sloping arena of mainly manly back apparitions, with flower trolleys rotating to pop music. Dif. wheels of $$ fortune spin, while a man holds sample as trolleys move behind, like some kind of whirlitzer, where you realise that you cannot process your surrounds at the pace they move in so let it go, minor whiplash at brush with price / scale.

Sarah Boulton // Zinc Violets ongoing

Zinc Violets is an ongoing work by my friend and ephemeral artist extraordinaire Sarah Boulton. Together we have collaborated on a few projects - as she now lives in Wales / was giving birth! / was on a residency - I have performed works (normally minimal gestures) on her behalf in London.

She invited me to be part of this project last year, at it’s opening in Masons Yard where Polly Wright and myself laid two identical paper poems down, very slowly at the same time.

Mason’s Yard and Sarah Boulton present an exhibition happening in the space of an evening, comprising of two intangible artworks. One is a prediction and the other, a scent. Both have occurred and will be occurring.

Extract from Press release, Masons Yard

The poems and project relate to a place called Epen in Holland, which given trace element zinc in the local water supply has changed the nature of the local violets, becoming a beloved emblem of the area.

As part of my Floral Pilgrimage pursuits, I am hoping to journey to Epen and find the violets on Sarah’s behalf. She wrote to me to tell me her latest thoughts, after I realised that although the residency at Blauwhaus was close it was too far to be able to visit that trip.

Currently, the next time Alice or Polly does a search in Epen, I am planning to spend the time predicting and every time I remember that I am predicting I will write down a short observation of what I see in front of me wherever I am. I am interested in the distance and these transformative flowers being at the end of the work, stretchable and transformative as it is.

What does a prediction feel like? To me it seems quite unlike most Contemporary Art, and yet a lot about contemporary life.

The flowers are always there in the back of the mind. Influencing and influenced.

Chelsea Fringe 2018 Proposal // Moon Viewing Platform at Patmore Estate

I was invited to develop a garden on the Patmore Estate as part of Chelsea Fringe 2018, and as runner-up my community garden project “The Moon Viewing Platform” was never realised, I would like to share elements of the design here.

Floral Pilgrimage II / Caergybi 18.07.18 - 21.07.18

Continuing on the floral pilgrimage 2017- 2018 I started a collaboration together with artist and educator Amy Ash, this time contemplating both physical and political changes to the landscape. We were drawn to walking around Holyhead, an island protruding off Wales, in alternative directions retracing the steps of St. Cybi and St. Seriol. One Saint who faced the darkness, the other the light which felt like a dualistic coping metaphor for the political horizon. This follows a period of dark reflection as Amy although married to a Londoner was nevertheless coerced into leaving London due to visa issues and so I walked in her place during Summer 2018, exploring sites of importance as either St.

On the walk I was both being documented in the landscape and taking photographs of my hands with religious imagery (self awarded pilgrimage stamps) within the landscape for a more embodied viewpoint. This dual documentation also reflects both the simultaneous outward and inner pathways offered by spiritual journeys often symbolised by the spiral. Then using snack bar wrappers, local pamphlets and these images, I sent her a map-place of the Island, something to both peruse and wear / physically enter the space.

Haverthorn V.4.1 // Magasine collaboration, Spring 2018 with Camilla Nelson

www.haverthorn.co.uk

Camilla Nelson

Haverthorn magazine is a literary magasine edited by Iris Colomb and Andrew Wells. Each magasine has a section that teams artists with poets in collaborations. I had the pleasure of responding to Camilla Nelson's existing work "Magnolia" and she created "Scorn Dolly" as inspired by my work "Closing the borders opened the gates of hell" photographed by Sebastian Trustman.

In order to get closer to Camilla Nelson's poem which seemed to me to express a harrowing and fragmented desire of something you do not really want, I worked with my flatmate to explore our fears concerning (although not necessarily related to) our desires for the future. The outcome involved envisaging a landscape surrounding the female form with abstract floral shapes of future pressures built from: self, society, family.

Floral Pilgrimage // Pilgrims Way ongoing

Ready for the unknown between Ned Kelly and Don Quixote: shield, stead (chihuahua), stick (chanel), helmet (aunt's schawl) and armour (knight's own.)

www.alicemccabe.com

Over the last three years I have been creating costumes designed for everyday living or survival in London. These have mainly taken the form of newspaper costumes, including an outfit made from icons from an app designed to help you save money, a floppy paper suit of British armour and tassels developed for attachment to a cloak or shield designed to both represent and ward off fears concerning Brexit.

My latest costume is an evolving pilgrimage suit that I started work on last Summer in connection with a series of workshops and commission for a cabinet space at PEER Gallery. Milk tops from a collection of mine have been insulated with tape and pinned onto a mail sack. I went on my first walk last year along a section of the Pilgrim’s Way with my dad then using images from the walk, have hand cut my own milk tops attaching them into the costume to replace damaged or worn patches with seasonal flowers and sights.

This Summer together with artist and educator Amy Ash we will walk around Holyhead in alternative directions retracing the steps of St. Cybi and St. Seriol. We will both be contemplating physical and political changes to the landscape, myself from the perspective of an independent florist and herself as an artist married to a Londoner but nevertheless coerced into leaving London due to visa issues.

Floral Heraldry // Summer Cabinet Commission at Peer Gallery and Workshops 07.17 - 09.17

Cabinet 1, 2 and 3 including last instalment the bouquet dispenser.

www.peeruk.org

4 Seasons was a commissioning programme exploring wildlife, biodiversity and the artists’ interest in nature supported by Ernest Kleinwort Charitable Trust. The brief was to create a seasonal display in a cabinet attached to the gallery, to be updated throughout the season.

My summer cabinet is a floral account of the everyday, documenting changes in seasonal cut flowers via flowers used in bouquets alongside wider news stories and accumulations of desk detritus. News images are conditioned and cropped as if they were flowers, whilst a more uniform stencil (that of a Swiss Milk Top - see my archive here - ) shapes the artist’s own personal paraphernalia. The resulting synthetic petals will then be transformed into wearable objects such as chain mail, votive necklaces and visors to be used and deposited on a walk from London, crossing the fabled Isle of Thanet emerging in Dover, to survey the changing European landscape from the perspective of an independent florist.

Clockwise from top left: Arden Estate Shakespeare Summer Party, Artists' Inventories an artist's talk at PEER and hand-tied bouquet making workshop at Shoreditch Library.