24/04/2009 by James.

I heard yesterday that we didn’t get the funding for Human Nature, my residency at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. The plan was for me to work in response to the Museum’s collections, both those on display and behind the scenes, exploring how culture has interpreted nature throughout history. I was going to investigate the museum’s natural history collection, which is moving on to new homes, and the local landscape, and involve the local community in creating their own work and influencing the themes and content of my own, and the resulting exhibition.

Anyway…. its not happening… BUT I am going to be running some workshops at the museum, so look out for those. And I am still fascinated by the way that societies use cultural practices to create and present different models of nature that they present to the world.

Today I have been continuing working with maps and natural history imagery, exploring how landscape and nature as concepts are presented, and how the ways that I treat these materials can make them accessible as material and image at the same time, starting to blur the boundaries between these representations, and the stuff of the world, and helping to enable a more direct sensory perception of the world around us.

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24/04/2009 by James.

I took a walk around the village yesterday and took some photos of the different drains, manholes and signs that are dotted around the road sides and surfaces.

I am attracted to the combination of the ‘man-made’ imagery and the worn and corroded surfaces, which link with the appropriated natural history imagery and cut/stitched/distressed materials in my work… a link between the image and object, man-made and natural.

For me these things are an expression of ‘one-ness’ and highlight the beauty to be found in the everyday.

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