PROPOSAL: Heathland Artworks
Breaking Ground (2022)
The Heathland Artworks Project is an exciting opportunity for the work to expand into a new landscape with very specific characteristics. The aim for the work is to focus on digging as performance. Research, at this stage, has highlighted the unique properties of heathland and the necessity for land management in the absence of long term community use of natural resources to maintain it. Vegetation and turf were cut for building, fodder and fuel. This activity along with grazing, prevented the growth of saplings and stripped the land of nutrients creating a sandy soil ideal for heather and gorse.
My aim for the project is to develop research around traditional methods of turf cutting as a means to identify with processes that shaped the characteristics associated with heathland. It is my intention to direct potential outcomes that result from cutting to create drawing in landscape. The work will investigate the materiality, structure and form of the turf and highlight absence created by the emerging trenches.
The site-performative aspect of the work hopes to respond to the lines in landscape such as shadows from the trees as a guide for the drawing. This creates a potential direction in the work towards notions of time as the suns moves around the tree(s). This could become an important factor associated with accumulation of time reflecting the generations of communities who have managed the land and thereby created the heathland. I also intend to perform the work over time so that the marks will change according to set regular intervals, for example, 10-12am one day a week.
My intention is to conserve any cut turf so that after the exhibition the material can be replaced and no or little change will be made to the environment in the long term. During the process of the dig, the preserved turf will provide the building blocks to create monument(s) as the work progresses.
ARTIST INFLUENCES:
Richard Long
A Line Made by walking (1967)
Robert Smithson
Sprial Jetty (1970)
Ana Mendieta
Untitled from “Silueta Series” (1976)
The proposal was submitted on the 31st March 2022.