Terroir/Boudoir
2005
lasercut plywood, coppiced branches, net curtain, dead weeds, detritus
500 x 450 x 250 cm
Exhibitions
•Terroir/Boudoir, Elastic Residence, London, 2005
"The last extreme of littleness is sublime also, because division, as well as addition, is infinite. Infinity fills the mind with that sort of delightful horror which is the truest test of the sublime; and succession and uniformity of parts, which constitute the artificial infinite, give the effect of sublimity in architecture." Edmund Burke
A grid of Jacobean-fret columns occupies the front room of a Georgian house in Whitechapel, London. Laser cut from plywood they syncopate the space into a dynamic maze, a flat-packed English Alhambra that is being overgrown from the back of the room by a claustrophobic forest. Dead Birch saplings transform the back of the room into a thick chiaroscuro tangle of branches and brambles punctuated with tattered shreds of net curtain.
This exhibition places highly ornate architectural elements within a 'natural' landscape - or is it the other way round?...this exhibition inverts an unnatural landscape. This inversion reflects a concern with the relationship between notions of the sublime and the personal or the opposed notions of nature as earthly paradise or dangerous wilderness. Questions of historic authenticity and personal identity, connections between nature and the way it has been constructed in art, the resonant quotient of terror over beauty in the search for a perfect sublime fold into each other..