Works From A Savage Garden

1999
Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, New Zealand
Gorse, paint, cotton, steel

Works From A Savage Garden attempts to confront certain socio-cultural issues relating to place by making use of the device of the site in a very minimalist way.
The gorse becomes a metaphor of the confrontation of chaos and formalism. Nature and culture symbolising the consciousness illuminating the work.
Gorse is perceived in the most mundane economic and ecological sense as either pest or protector. Seen as a threat it can be read as a symbol for colonisation, yet in its transplantation it is also transformed.
It provides a set of references linked to my own absorption into a new, yet to be defined cultural landscape.

“Red gorse is a living, ephemeral installation. The gorse is in flower and there is a degree of self development of the project, self erosion, that I as the artist have little control as to its final outcome.”