| Project title: | A Place to Heal |
| Location: | A de-materialised, itinerant project, seeded in the Healing Garden at Treliske Hospital, Cornwall |
| Date(s): | July 2024 – ongoing |
Conversations and ideas around how our environment can heal us and how we can return the favour…
Artist statement
A multi disciplined creative, drawing parallels between the natural world and human nature. I hope to encourage discourse and create a space that will allow people to feel supported and more able to make healthier choices for the environment. As an award winning horticulturalist, I’m a keen believer in the restorative quality of plants and their natural desire to thrive. I draw upon a deep connection to the living world to facilitate and engage with human nature within my artwork.
Traditionally a figurative artist, my practice is grounded by natural elements, using outdoor landscapes, natural inks, charcoal, clay and graphite, I attempt to draw lines between human nature and what we see in the natural world. I enjoy studying human nature as much as sitting watching a fern unfurl, we can learn from both. Through exploration of the proximity of nature I hope to capture the commonality of human beings and our surrounding landscape, in the hope that we can connect and engage better.
Finding inspiration by observing and capturing plant strategies of survival, I hope to draw out commonality, drawn images of plant qualities, photographic studies and sculptural work are all supported by reflection and research, with the hope that a spectrum of meanings will engage and facilitate a deeper connection.
By integrating my artistic practice with an established career as a horticulturalist, I hope not only to sustain both careers, but to create socially connected work by talking, promoting better decision-making for the environment and people. A time declared as the Anthropocene, it is no longer a time to create artwork to escape and reflect upon what we think, but rather to engage people so that we all feel able to make better choices. Plant life has made it through several previous epochs of different scales, so it makes sense that we should follow the lead of plants and learn from their methods of survival to inform our next best move. A less human-centred approach to surviving the coming times has to be worth a try…
A Place to Heal
‘I’m incredibly lucky because I live near the woods and I go out every day, usually early in the morning. I love being near growing things and noticing all the changes in trees, birds and wildflowers throughout the year. Nature is my way of feeling joined up with the universe and at peace ‘
Contextual statement
‘A Place to Heal’ is an enquiry into how our environment can help us, and how we can help it; a varied exploration into the subject. It culminates in a dematerialised, time-based series of discussions. It facilitates the processes of environmental regeneration, by engaging the botanical and socio-political underpinnings of the landscape. Conversations that came out of time spent in a Healing Garden, interactions with an itinerant sculpture, and an event that handed over a book to people who used the Hospital all occurred over several months.
Inspired by conversations that followed the design and installation of the Healing Garden at Treliske Hospital, I started to record some of these. Families were supported through difficult times in the healing garden; sick people recovered; some people were able to pass away peacefully within a hospital bed surrounded by nature, and it stimulated further conversations around nature’s ability to heal.
As a second format to the exploration, some conversations were recorded in a book, where the aim was to stimulate further thinking and discussion. Connecting concepts of plant entanglement, whilst supported by ideas of sustainable relationships, plant diaspora, semiotics, and the materiality of landscapes, it combined images of the Healing Garden and a hospital bed within nature. The book was given to nurses and patients at the hospital, where we documented further conversations. Kurt Jackson kindly provided a foreword and afterword for the book.
‘Patients can come down to feel the fresh air and see the sky, smell the plants and hear birdsong. That is very special. These positive experiences will help them on their individual pathways to recovery. Just being able to get away from the noise of the unit, to get out in the green, creates a calm feeling, people say I feel alive again!’ Kym Vigus, RCHT Staff Nurse.
“I remember opening my eyes and getting a huge feeling that, ‘I’m back’,” he said. “It was the simplicity of a ray of sunshine on my face and the healing power of nature.” Robin Hanbury Tennison OBE
A socially engaged artwork that I hope will support progressive conversations around how a place can heal and how we can move toward healing the environment too. I looked to dematerialise my practice, initially by removing the figurative element of my work, delving deeper into the actual connections with nature, and dwelling on that, that was providing a place to heal, rather than a subjective reflection of something. My aim for the project was to activate fresh discourse around how we can make healthier choices for the environment and society.
To further dematerialise outcomes for this project, I documented a hospital bed within a series of environments, exploring the effect of the landscape. Documenting photographically the way our surroundings affect our ability to heal, the bed became in part, performative and a provocation for discourse. As we ferried the bed from one location to another unannounced, we met different people who wanted to sit on the bed and discuss their thoughts on how nature could heal. The conversations were used as a stimulus to further exploration within the book. Forming a third layer to the project, a gallery of photos, videos, drawings, a podcast, and other conversations can all be seen on this website:
https://a-place-to-heal.squarespace.com/
In terms of methodology, the project was fundamentally a collaborative, socially engaged artwork strongly supported by values of eco art and discoveries in plant entanglement. Theoretical underpinning includes Claire Bishop’s work on collaborative practice, Grant Kester’s Dialogic Art, supported by Lucy Lippard’s thoughts on eco art and dematerialisation. Foundation from Hodder’s work on cultural entanglement, and Sheldrake’s Life Entangled.
‘I think we need to integrate nature more into our lives. We need to not just have tiny pockets of it that we control tightly (like paved gardens with a little border of plants or tarmacked parking spaces with single plant pots on them. We need to understand that we are nature and should learn to thrive within our own habitat, rather than sterilising relatively huge spaces and making it impossible for nature to live within the boundaries we have set around ourselves’.
‘Early in my twenties, a doctor ‘prescribed’ me a regular working session in a community garden and, although at first I was sceptical, over time I noticed a pronounced lifting of my mood. I’d been keen to avoid taking antidepressants and I wonder if perhaps this was the edge that I needed to avoid jumping on that gravy train everyone seemed to be riding back then. I look at the friends I spoke to about my depression who confided they were tasking the pills and none of them seem to have managed to conquer their demons. Although I still have bouts these days, I feel I’m in a much better place generally than most and I can’t help but wonder at the timely correlation of my sinking bouts and inability to make it outdoors (into nature). Perhaps there’s more in it than any of us realise’.
‘If humanity can embody this oneness with nature, and understand our reciprocal duties and responsibilities, we might be better able to move beyond what Jennifer Marlon, a climate researcher at Yale University, has called “false hope” – that is, that God or nature (as distinct from us) will make the problem go away without any action from us. What we need instead is “constructive hope”. We must believe that we have the agency to change the world and curb climate change. This determination and hope could come from understanding our interconnectedness with, and our duties to, nature and ourselves.’ McNamara, 2021