closing in / green close up (35mm)
GREENING: works in progress (2020 - )
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“What is it like to be inside a color?”
Germinating during lockdown and rooted in earlier experiences, Greening explores what it means to become green, to embody and inhabit it. This on-going project is a creative and intimate exploration, and contemplation of the colour green through personal experiences of gardening, walking, and landscapes interwoven with reflections on its cultural history, symbolism, and appearance within art, nature, philosophy, poetry, music.
This is an ongoing dialogue with the natural and other than human world, as per Edward O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia as being an "urge to affiliate with other forms of life."
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In 2023 I received an Arts Council DYCP grant to experiment with what a hybrid arts and writing practice looks like seen through a green lens. I will sift through notes, ideas, thoughts and research I have gathered thus far to explore shapes and forms of production. I will work with a mentor to develop fledgling writing projects. I will experiment with making green inks and dyes from plants, and re-engaging with 35mm film.
**Posting progress on my Instagram #greening**
Ghost Plants
Just before the world locked down, my beloved (grand)father died. Whilst sorting through his life, we discovered a Polaroid camera in a drawer, with a pack of unopened film - dateless, but likely ancient. With the new greens of May rapidly pursuing dominion of my garden, today I got it out.
These are the results.
Sometimes green can’t be seen as green anymore.
It is shadowy and stripped of colour, like memory.
Ghostly greens. Unearthly.
Phantom.
Senescing as we all are,
as everything is.
Bound for earth.
Like your fading hand on the mock invoice that you made me for my 30th birthday framed on the wall in the hallway.
Green framed with love.
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Green Ink
I set myself the challenge of attempting to make green ink out of plant matter. I am hopeful for green liquid.
I am in pursuit of the ultimate green pigment.
Yet, is there such thing as the ‘ultimate’ plant green?
What is a perfect green ink?
What will the process show me?
"chlorophyll" from the Greek chloros, meaning "green", and phyllon, meaning "leaf".
The natural pigment that lives in the complex inner world of plants that makes them green. It is the magic dust that gathers the suns energy so that its host can generate its own food.
I make my preparations to become chemist, witch, alchemist. I fill my laboratory with books, links, and recipes, binders, mordants and fixatives, thickeners and oils, bottles and pipettes, iron and copper sulphates, filters, strainers, mashers, a cauldron.
I quickly discover that as soon as green is plucked from its roots it begins to die.
All that is green
becomes brown
eventually.
Green is the colour of inexperience.
To be green behind the ears, is to be naive.
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Garden Queens
with Cyanotype print experiments
During the summer of 2023, I kept a teasel diary. An almanac. This is a short extract. Published Summer 2025.
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There are two teasel plants standing guard in two corners of the raised bed in the centre of my small, loosely woven garden. In a third corner, the ageing wild fennel swells itself, threatening to take the whole territory. I have a hunch that teasels are canny and capable of all kinds of magical things. Things that cannot be known from simply passing them by in the wild.
The word teasel stems from the Old English tǣsl, tǣsel; and relates to the verb tease. The Middle English root meaning of which is to pluck, pull, tear; pull apart, comb.
Though it is not my wish to tear you apart.
I am your beholder, your gaper, your gazer.
Your plucker, your puller, your teaser.
Instead, I shall look upon each part of you closely, and attempt a kind of visual plucking so that you will not know that I am there. And I shall diligently comb your hair and attend to you so that I can know what it is to be teasel. What it is to be teasely, What it is to be teased, plucked, and attended to as you thrive, grow, and age.
I want to learn what it is to be plant.
To be alive and willed and waning.
This is why I want you in my garden. To see your wildness, your tiny things. To zoom into your miniscule worlds, to witness your incremental cellular changes as you urge into and out of the world.
To see how you move, how you live, how you dance.
I shall be your witness. Gathering clues about you like a private detective, scientist, lover.
When summer is over, and you’re parched and thick with sun, I shall snip off your prickly heads one by one, and lay you on the chairs in my house like they do at National Trust houses where you live in the after-life. At rest on the time-worn palatial chairs that were made for the fleshy bottoms of Queens and Ladies.