Glasgow
Feeling out city ecologies led me to seek death. Life turns as a wheel and things do not make sense without death. So often invisible in urban environments, I hunted for it in whatever body it took.
organic. Arsonised motorbike wax crayon.
Roadkilled beings die in violence, and are removed by the council before being mass-incinerated. Their bodies do not decompose. This is in many ways a necessary interruption for the health and safety of the city's living inhabitants, pressed so close together that living on top of necro-communities would be harmful. But it is also a grief. This project tries to complete circles by honouring the deaths that found me, and at least returns emotional/spiritual energy to nourish soils.
Crow is the trickster-teacher. I wonder what they think of us naming our happiness-related wrinkles after their feet, or of ageism and our global youth industry.
Digital photography and drawing using ink, gouache, graphite, hyaluronic acid, collagen, compost, chaga powder.
Laughter Lines.
Pigeon, historically a good omen and a symbol of cooperation and community.
Using saining, prayer, and sacred herbs, these large 2.5 x 1.5m drawings were carried out as a sanctifying ritual. The final step involved using a Rosemary branch to mark the pieces with Myrhh oil, for rememberance and embalming, respectively. Be at peace.
Untitled (mixed media) and Untitled (red line).
In Glasgow, multi-species kinships press in from all sides in the apparently devoid-of-nature urban environment: mice and mould in tenements, people feeding seeds and bread to ducks in the park, dog-owners chasing dogs chasing squirrels, magpies picking through litter. Considering Glasgow's fierce political and community spirit, this is a city with intriguing and complex webs of interaction and relationship.
Living here has provoked a shift in my attention towards matters of social import, towards ecologies that creep across kingdoms, ensnared in global systems of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. Living here has opened an invitation to consider how we can write different futures from the wreckage of extractive, exploitative systems.
