Verdant

Verdant unfolds as a slow journey into a landscape that is densely alive, rich with vegetation and is defined by a singular colour of lush green The creation of artworks that enter a dialogue with nature that has this specific quality represent the experience within such a place rather than boast an arrival at such a highly sought after destination. Verdant reflects on the experience of being in this quality of nature that is not a predetermined movement to reach the peak of a mountain such as a hike or running to the top to achieve a personal best, but instead is about the situated self in such a richly green place. The visualisation of the sensations that the body accommodates through being in place and also, as place in both material form and metaphor. Verdant is a commentary on crossing the threshold from human centred experience to the holistic blurred and ephemeral experience of nature that allows for a quiet transformation that occurs from being fuori (outside). Here, the journey is not heroic, but intimate, recursive, and attentive. In simple form verdant is a reflection on attunement and witnessing that is so strong the body becomes an instrument for another sentient earthy experience.

At the start of the millennia nature has no fixed path even though we operate on settled points in the landscape. The language of Verdant for both the viewer and the artist is one of moving through. Moving past the mosquito net, further into, but not yet out of the woods. Orientation is partial, continually adjusting. The works do not offer a vantage point from which to survey but instead position the viewer within a field of proximity. Close to surfaces, close to forms, close to the subtle shifts of light. This is a space where perception is slowed, and where meaning emerges through proximity and duration. Close too becomes almost entwined or entangled with a particular form of perception.

Verdant draws on the literary structures of the hero’s journey. The crossing of thresholds, the passage through uncertainty. Whereas in the hero’s tale there is an outcome these works instead resist resolution. Proposing a porous navigation, where moments of clarity arise not as endpoints, but as brief illuminations within an ongoing process. To be able to see through a canopy or find ease in the hollow of a tree where there is shade from a blue sky above. Light moves softly through the works. Light is held in the crystalline surfaces of the glaze on ceramic forms, on rhinestones in fabrics and is used with a sensibility to warm forms from within. Even in shadow, throughout Verdant there is a sense of an anticipated subtle radiance, a quiet persistence.

The forms that populate this terrain with their fruiting bodies, enclosing leaves, and layered growth operate as both structures and companions. They hld and protect, but also press inward, creating a tension between containment and expansion. Desire moves here as a vegetal force: unfolding, coiling, reaching. It is not directed outward, but circulatory. The process of making moves through systems of growth, through cycles of emergence and return. Layered and process based the artworks here combine memory, sense felt experience, myths, and personal stories and tragedies.

Materiality becomes a site of bodily thinking. The works are built through accumulation, layering, and repetitio. Processes that echo ecological systems as well as the temporal unfolding of a journey. Surfaces are not fixed, but evolving they hold traces of what has been, while remaining open to what might still emerge. At times, this logic is interrupted by gestures of construction such as cardboard gardens, provisional environments hat sit between the natural and the made. These moments do not rupture but that what we understand as “nature” is always already shaped, held, and reimagined. There are no wild places left to be encountered.

Enchantment is present, but it is quiet, structural. It resides in the capacity of the works to hold attention, to draw the viewer into a state of sustained looking and sensing. It is not spectacle, but a soft insistence: a subtle invitation to remain, to notice, to be with what is not immediately clear. To enter Verdant is to move gently, to remain attentive, and to trust in the slow, persistent unfolding of light. To witness what it is left knowing it is enough to propagate a new.