The PLACE Collective presents, SEE HERE NOW: Art in a Time of Urgency, a collective creative response to local and global climate and nature crises. What is present? What is absent? Who speaks? Who is silent? These and other questions are addressed through a range of media, offering beauty and concern, slowness and urgency.

The show includes video, audio, 2D imagery, poetry, photography and sculptural work. Between all the pieces, there is a golden thread of attention to relationships within the natural world, and where art may invite or stimulate closer noticing and a deepening of connections, to become part of a process of restoring balance where this has been lost.

I am delighted to announce that my How to Draw: A Daffodil Triptych (2023) will be on view in the show.

How to Draw: A Daffodil Triptych (2023)

Daffodils have occupied a key place in the popular imagination of English landscape since Wordsworth’s “daffodil” poem (“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”) secured their popularity in 1807. Who speaks in these representations? The loudest voice, in How to Draw: A Daffodil Triptych, is the black pen on the white paper (a combination of bleached tree and plastic, oil-based marker pen).The black line is the voice of human agency using natural materials as a mouthpiece. So often, the human representation of another life form entails the death, destruction, damage, silencing, drawing out or over of the nonhuman form.

Decaying daffodil flower heads were pressed into a pen-drawn image of the same heads to produce two further works: one is an imprint made by the colour leached from the daffodil flower and the black pen lines of its human representation; the other is a ghostly imprint, a paper shroud, where the form of the daffodil heads, now absent, leave their indent in the page. Something of the flowers is drawn into the paper, imprinting a response to the human effort to represent them, a quiet speaking back or about this interspecies impression and the silent cost of representation?

This seemingly innocuous work asks what the cost of human art making and reproduction is to the world we seek to celebrate with our representations? What is the shadow ecology embedded within our making?

 AN “EPIC” anthology

I’m delighted to have an excerpt from EPIC (Guillemot, 2021) included in this new anthology in this Whitechapel Gallery series of Documents of Contemporary Art.

WALKING surveys the proliferation of pedestrian practices across contemporary art, taking an avowedly political stance on where and how the three practices of art, walking and writing intersect.

Across the world, walking is a vital way to assert one's presence in public space and discourse. Walking maps the terrain of contemporary walking practices, foregrounding work by Black artists, Indigenous artists and artists of colour, working-class artists, LGBTQI+ artists, disabled artists and neurodiverse artists, as well as many more who are frequently denied the right to take their places in public space, not only in the street or the countryside but also in art discourse. This anthology contends that, as a relational practice, walking inevitably touches upon questions of access, public space, land ownership and use. Walking is therefore always a political act.

Edited by Tom Jeffreys for MIT Press / The Whitechapel Gallery (2024).