A Sense of Place #1 considers how one’s experiences while gardening can generate narratives that convert anonymous locations into lived places. It is significant that gardening as an activity demands one to develop an awareness of the local, the conditions, the content, the effect of interaction. Collaboration, symbiosis, one’s life becomes entwined with the life of the garden.
A collection of images detailing key stages in the process of planting, caring, picking, storing and consuming beans are sliced into strips. These strips are then selected at random and woven through galvanised mesh to create a fragmented scene, a montage where although small details remain discernible the context and chronology are blurred and rearranged. For me this representation alludes to my memory of the actual experiences – while some events remain vivid others are lost to conscious thought.
I also consider how these lived experiences have the capacity to create a landscape of the mind where my actions, relationships and choices generate a psychological topography. This aspect is embodied by shaping the mesh into ‘hills’ and ‘valleys’ that symbolically allude to how thoughts combine into dominant and enduring recollections of particular events.
