I’ve written a couple of posts on my time with Spud in the New Forest this Spring, once before I started my residency, and again after a week spent there in March. But nothing since setting up my installation Neuro/Queering Nature. So this post fills in those gaps, and shares the exhibition with those of you that can’t make it along.
I came home last week, a couple of days early and before the opening event, as I managed to catch covid. But we got the work installed before I had to leave, and I’m proud of what I achieved, and thankful for all the support I received from everyone. We hope to have a closing event, for those people who would like to experience my installation and hear a little from me about the work, before the exhibition ends. Full details to follow soon.
Since writing The Body of the Forest in March, I worked with Artist Hannah Buckingham, one of Spud’s graduate artists, and the Together – make art! group that she runs for Spud with local LGBTQAI+ young people. I shared with the group the ways that my work documents my experiences of places as an autistic, queer person, and that my time in the Forest was about paying attention to my sensory experiences of wetlands, layering documention of those experiences with ‘official’ natural history imagery.
We talked about the value of experiencing the world in ways that don’t fit the norm, and of making artwork based on those experiences, including work that blurs the boundaries between people and other animals. Together we designed wearable artwork, experimented with collage, and shared a walk from Spud through the village and out across the heath, to visit streams and woodland. Photographs of some of the group’s wearable artworks are now included in the exhibition.
My time in the Forest focused on Avon Water. My experience of that river was one of an interconnected network of bog and heathland plants, coloured clays, mammals including foxes, deer and ponies, and the wetland birds that live in the Keyhaven and Lymington marshes where the river meets the sea. It is a wooded river, the water runs between exposed roots, around trunks, and deposits stacks of fallen branches as the levels rise and fall.
It is a richly diverse and a managed landscape, even if at first glance it doesn’t appear that way. Stretches of river have been re-wiggled, animals are grazed, and plantations are fenced and gated. The installation that I pieced together at Spud refers to my journey along Avon Water, and connects together woody structures in a way that echos the wooded nature of the river.
Joined with rope and orange twine, wooden chairs and stools create spaces for the pauses that I took in my journey, whilst lengths of ladder make stepped connections between them, and boxes hold the objects that I gathered along the way. A video projected at the end of the gallery collages together photographs of muddy animal footprints, footage of bubbling amber water, camera trap film of deer, and the sound of calling waders. Large scale drawings celebrate the words used to name and classify bog plants and water birds, using ochre and red clays found along the river’s length.
Neuro/Queering Nature runs until 4th July 2024 at Spudworks, Station Road, Sway. SO41 6BA
Queer River 