Grammar of loss
This body of work was informed by her becoming aware of the removal of terms that relate to the natural world form contemporary dictionaries. Grammar of loss highlights the increasing absence of the natural world observed in anthropocentric thinking. This sculptural installation explores processes of life, decay and loss as well as discussing our linguistic understanding of the animacy of the natural world.
This installation incorporates elements of written text in the hanging clay tiles entitled communion of subjects. Robin Wall Kimmerer's text ‘Learning the grammar of animacy’ has been a reference point for this work. Kimmerer describes how languages through time are losing their value whilst also exploring how language impacts the perceived animacy of nature.
Grammar of loss is an installation incorporating video, naturally dyed/ painted fabric and both clay and porcelain sculptures. This instillation responds to language and lost languages that relate specifically to plant life. A long list of words describing nature have been removed from early education dictionaries and replaced by technologically based vocabulary. Grammar of loss quietly contests this identifiable anthropocentrism. By replicating and replacing these ‘lost plants’ their value and presence as essential beings become apparent, requiring attention and importance. This can be identified in the porcelain sculptures entitled Viable microcosms in both their fragility and multitude.
Time is an important element of the project that can be identified throughout Grammar of loss. The dye used in the fabric pieces entitled Fermented entities has been made by fermenting lichens, that are a fungus and an algae in a stable symbiotic partnership. Imagery from fermented entities is mirrored in the video piece Kinetic paralyses, an unedited, one take video piece depicting organically moving plant life on an overhead projector.
She is working with an ecocentric approach, which finds inherent value in all of nature, to explore this lost language whilst portraying the innate beauty of the natural world. Her practice is concerned with capturing this loss that is evident in language and renewing its value as tangible things which occupy artistic space