- 1. Emergence of Complex Life Depicted in Three Found objects. (2019)
Found objects
30 X 30cm
Cement and steel respond to changes in climate by expanding and contracting at the same rate, in a sense “breathing” together so as to be structurally interdependent - giving re-enforced concrete a strange symbiotic quality.
‘Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.'
Aristotle
- 2. Evolution: “life has no direction but it branches” (2019)
- Found objects
- 60 X 60cm
- “Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.”
- Lynn Margulis,
3. Industrial Revolution (Reconstituted) (2019)
Steel, Carborundum, epoxy resin
60 X 60cm
Particles from metal workshop floor combined with Carborundum grit (waste from the lithography department and one of the most important patents of the industrial revolution)
4 Anthro-tektite (2019)
Found object
60 x 60cm
Sample of industrial shale-oil mining waste material brought temporarily from the site in west Lothian where humans first began extracting oil from the earth.
The immense violence and heat involved in the extraction process could be thought of as a man-made volcanic event or even meteoric impact crater in which human kind is the asteroid.
5. Life (Work in Process) (2019)
- Plaster, Steel
- 60cm x 70cm
- An example of ‘Thinking through making’ (Ingold) in which the artist attempts to comprehend the cyclical nature of materiality and apprehend the meaning of ‘Humankind’ as a geological agent.
5. Life (Work in Process) (2019)
Detail.
8. Autolithography – Dreaming of the Anthropocene (2019)
- Plaster, Iron particles
- 10x10x8cm
9. The Comfort & The Pain of Embracing Impermanence (OR) Solastalgia and Nirvana expressed in the Entropic Disintegration of a Found Object) (2019)
- Iron, Fe2O3
- 30 x 30cm
Solastalgia (detail)
10. Blood of the Earth (2019)
- Steel, iron, soil , water, gravity
- 80cm x 80cm
- Named after Leonardo DaVinci’s deep insight into the power and processes of rivers. This screen print is made with rust-laden sediment intercepted from a stream running through a salvage yard in east Lothian where chemical, physical and biological processes are decomposing decades of human artefacts.
- By mixing blood-red soil, with water on a tilted plane the artist reveals the underlying gravitational and thermodynamic forces that constitute time and the irreversible change, that shapes the landscape and flow though our bodies and all life on earth.
Blood of the Earth (detail)
11. The Future of Me You and Every Thing You Know.
- Fe203, sediment, water,
- 35 x 40cm
- salvage-yard sediment- loaded with microscopic particles and trace elements from the disintegration of abandoned artefacts. The silt was left to dry out creating non scalar branching pattern redolent of a parched desert at a thickness of 1mm - the same depth as the layer of sediment laid down globally that marks a new chapter in geological time, widely referred to as the Anthropocene.
12. Boorach: Entropy and the Order of Life
(2016)
- Found objects
- 130x220cm
A hexagonal form appears nested amid a spread of steel blades in various states of decay, referencing the evolution of life - as a entropic process - emerging from a confluence of forces in an apparent “Localised Reversal of the Arrow of Time”