LAND PIECES

I often find myself contemplating how we experience space/place/landscape. I often find myself contemplating the transience of things and the passage of time. I'm drawn to making ephemeral gestures in ways that are sometimes poetic, subversive, political, meditative, or which serve as personal rituals...

These 'land pieces' are private experiments. I started making them in 2010 as a spur of the moment action. Though they are always the result of a performative gesture, they're fundamentally installations in the landscape. Conceived as ephemeral interventions, the materials used are always 'poor' or found Due to their often on-the-go nature, they're all documented using a mobile phone.

Site, place and space have also been important constants in my practice as part of Accidental Collective; which regularly engaged with notions of place, site-specificity and/or site-responsivity. Our work has often taken place in non-theatre spaces such as bars, government buildings, beaches, city centres, shop windows, and even a football stadium.

(recent works)

Bones and Bulbs

March 2023

I performed this small ritual action as an incongruous burial to mark my 40th birthday. Though flirting with the funerial, putting the last four decades to rest, it also is a piece about hope and new beginnings.
A while back, probably between 2016-2017, I collected a number of different animal bones from the Thames' south bank in London during low tide. They were beautifully weathered by the river, smooth and almost fossil-like. I selected five of them, in increasing size, and engraved them. I selected four shorter and thinner bones to act as dashes between the engraved ones. Since I didn't want this collection of bones to end with my 40th birthday, I added a final bone, the only one that wasn't broken in some way, which I engraved with the message: AND MANY MORE. I buried the bones, together with 40 crocus bulbs and 40 iris renticulata bulbs, which should flower around my 41st birthday next year.

New New Forest

27th July 2010
Red Shoot, New Forest

During a solitary early morning walk, I came across a pile of seven tree trunks. Their weathered texture, and the fact there were no stumps in the vicinity, suggested they had been felled a long time ago, and possibly somewhere else. I was drawn to their incongruity within the landscape, emphasising it by erecting six of them in a quasi-circular formation; a new New Forest made up of monumentally upright, dead tree stumps.

Pebbles to the People

8th August 2010
Whitstable

Again, I was walking by myself when I made this unplanned 'land piece'. I selected seven pebbles from the beach for their interesting texture, colour, or other features. Using a biro I inscribed them with designs and/or texts which drew attention to their idiosyncrasies. I then left them behind in different places along the seafront for people to find (having written “for you” on the reverse). The piece's title is a play on Accidental Collective's performance Pebbles to the Pier, which was created specifically for Herne Bay (only a few miles further down the coast).

Earth Movements: A, B, C.

17th December 2010 – 18th January 2011
Canterbury (UK), Alicante (Spain), Berlin (Germany)

This piece involved the planned and cross-border movement of earth between three different countries. The “A, B, C” in its title relates to the locations where the soil was taken from: Alicante, Berlin and Canterbury.
On the 17th December 2010 I dug a hole in my back garden in Canterbury, putting the earth collected into two sealed bags. I took these samples with me to Spain and Germany, where I repeated the same action on the 17th December 2010 (Alicante) and on the 7th January 2011 (Berlin). At each location I refilled the holes with soil from the other two places: Alicante & Canterbury in Berlin; Berlin & Canterbury in Alicante; and finally completing the piece on 18th January 2011, Alicante & Berlin in Canterbury. With its movement of earth across borders, the piece sough to explore notions of nationhood and belonging, inadvertently challenging airport security regulations (carrying earth samples in my hand luggage).

Tempus Fugit

11th September 2011
Alicante (Spain)

For this piece I collected 124 leaves, some of the first to fall, from Dane John's Garden (Canterbury). On each of them, I wrote common expressions in Spanish. All phrases were about time in some way or another: any time in the past was better, don't lose/waste time, time is gold/money, time flies when you're having fun, time heals all wounds... I then took the leaves to Alicante (Spain) and placed them in the town hall square, where people gather to celebrate New Year's Eve. Incidentally, there are no trees nearby. Even if there were, they wouldn't be shedding leaves in September.
The piece coincided with the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The leaves were placed in a neat pile which the wind began to scatter (passers by also picked up a few). The piece was conceived to last for an unspecified length of time, until the last leave was destroyed or removed. As its title suggests, this 'land piece' addressed the passage of time and the evanescent nature of every moment.

Images courtesy of Lucy Johnson, Phoebe Marsh and Daisy Orton.

Untitled rag altar

17th March 2013
Clowes Wood, Canterbury

I made this piece to mark my 30th birthday, following a ritual/liminal structure. Having cleared out my wardrobe of clothes gathered throughout my 20s, I invited friends to cut them up into strips after a pub lunch, and tie them together as a sort of rag bunting. We then walked into the woods where I chose a spot for all of us to place them. Whilst we did this the sun started to set, so that our walk back took place at dusk. The rag altar was left in the woods as shreds of discarded skin. This is the only truly autobiographical 'land piece' to date.

Shelter #1

March 2016
University of Kent, Canterbury

Cities Will Fall v.1

16th March 2016
Globe Warft, Rotherhithe, London

This temporary structure was erected using detritus washed up on the Thames south riverbank during low tide (after three attempts which ended in collapse). With the City of London as its background, it stood for only 10 minutes. The structure was then deliberately destroyed (a marked difference with the other land art pieces featured here). It is this process of construction and destruction which was the work's main gesture.

Troop Deployment

Ongoing since 4th October 2017
Barcelona, Berlin, London, Lancaster

I began this now ongoing work on October 4th 2017, on my arrival in Barcelona. I was there on an impromptu art-activism visit in response to the events surrounding the Catalan independence referendum. The images of police brutality reaching me via my laptop in my kitchen in Birmingham had left me speechless, and then propelled me into action. I hurriedly packed a back with performance stuff and got on a flight, Knowing that Guardia Civil troops and Police reinforcements were deployed across Catalonia in large numbers, I had made sure to take the bag of plastic toy soldiers.

The arrangement of soldiers became am oxymoronically subversive gesture, which always responded to its surroundings. Assertive and absurd. Playfully political. Violent and Vulnerable. This urban intervention is the first 'land piece' where I don't use found objects. Instead, since the soldiers are merely blue-tacked, these temporary arrangements are at the mercy of the public. It is them who are the erosive force. In 2019 I completed two special editions you can see below.

Cities Will Fall v.2

11th November 2017
Tate Modern Bankside, London

This time I erected a series of independent structures closer to the shore. Rather than knocking them down, I left them to the mercy of the quickly rising tide. There was an accidental, passing audience of people watching, from above, on the promenade outside Tate Modern. In this, the work was significantly more public and performative than before. Someone commented: "You're like an urban Andy Goldsworthy." (swoon much?)

Cities Will Fall v.3 - to the tide

16th November 2017
Morecambe Bay, Lancashire

Troop Deployment (Shakespeare edition, #21 - #38)

20th - 22nd May 2019
Stratford-upon-Avon (various locations)

Over the course of three days, I created a series of Troop Deployments which directly staged or were inspired by specific scenes from Shakespeare's plays. The works were installed haphazardly in various locations around Stratford-upon-Avon. Key quotes from each scene were given as the title for each of the works.

Troop Deployment (D-Day edition - #40)

6th June 2019
Birmingham (Memorial Hall)

Coinciding with the 5oth anniversary of the D-Day landings by Allied forces on the Normandy coast, I created a special Troop Deployment. It was the first time that I used a whole bag of toy soldiers for an intervention of this kind (a total of 140). As a happy coincidence, the bag that they were packaged in was dispatched from Omaha, USA (incidentally, one of the code names of one of the beaches where the Allied forces disembarked).
It was also the first time that I took photographs of the process of installing the piece, rather than just documenting the final arrangement as usual. As a result, these series of images show the soldiers leaving their bag and heading towards one of the memorial's doors.
The location for this Troop Deployment was Birmingham's Hall of Memory, which opened in 1926 to commemorate the men and women of Birmingham who gave their lives in the First World War, Second World War and in active service since 1945. You can find out more information about it here.

Cities Will Fall v.4 - in conversation

22nd June 2019
Herne Bay, Kent

This iteration of the work responded directly to its location, by constructing a temporary structure made of stones and pebbles found in situ, facing the crumbling remnants of Herne Bay's Old Pier head. These two precarious structures were, thus in conversation. At least until the rising tide tore down the smaller of the two. The piece was placed atop one of the post of the characteristic local groynes (wooden defenses against coastal erosion).
Here Bay was also the site of one of my projects with Accidental Collective, Pebbles to the Pier.