With this new body of work I wish to continue to develop ways to engage audiences in concrete experiences that operate at many levels of meaning, from the familiar and popular to the abstract and symbolic. The subject of the garden and the motif of the rose provide a visual language upon which to base this development.
The set of ideas that underpin this work links our relationship to social and private space with issues of mobility and exchange. The garden can be private and intimate, or very public. Gardens offer many different kinds of spatial experience, from the enclosed to the open, with walls and locked gates to flexible and permeable boundaries. The garden shed or house can act as a container for tools, as a shelter or a metaphor for a utopian dream. Flowers and plants are given as gifts and often exchanged by gardeners as cuttings or seeds. Through exchange, flowers and plants become mobile, literally moving from one garden to another.
Notions of ‘mobility’ represent one of my main interests underpinning this body of work, and one I see as a key issue of our time. Issues of mobility effect all aspects of our personal and working lives. Since moving to the Shetland Islands in the year 2000, my perspective on the world has changed dramatically. I am now acutely aware of movement from place to place, whether physically or virtually.
In this work I am looking at the idea of ‘mobility’ from a number of perspectives. We have increased mobility in work and travel, which is facilitated and paralleled by technology for mobile communication systems. I am using different kinds of communication exchange, such as postcards, newsletters, text messages, the Internet and the media. I also would like in the longer term to identify ways to use the media - radio, newspapers, magazines and television – to extend the work and thus add a new dimension to my practice which hasn’t existed in my previous projects.
By using shared themes and motifs in three different locations, I am testing, literally, the work’s ‘mobility’, i.e. how different contexts effect the reading and reception of these shared elements when it travels to a new location. For example, by using garden architecture or plant and seed exchanges, I wish to test whether and how meanings, perception and usage are shared or changed.
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