Woods

Woods is a collection of objects made of wood, paint, ink and photography, ranging from 1 - 18 inches in size, started around December 2019. The photographs used for the objects were taken from 2012 onwards. There is no definitive ending to the project - it grows organically over time. Woods and “DOG” are related projects - Woods utilises wood, and “DOG” is essentially a sketchbook project of printed photography.

The project is about “identity” in the very broadest, human-animal wide sense. How can a collection of babbling thoughts coming from some unknown realm called consciousness be the bedrock of what we call a person? The more I try to creatively drill into it, the more absurd the notion of personal identity as we generally think of it appears to me.

I regard each wood as a ‘“thought bubble”. Objects and thoughts become the same thing. The photographs in Woods often appear barely related to each other, like the bubbles of thought that glide through our heads, rarely examined as more than simply a sense of experiencing the world and reacting to it. The individual woods are in some ways stand-ins for thoughts as they occur, before they fade from existence as mysteriously and unceremoniously as they appeared. I’m not making them because the transient thought bubbles by themselves are of paramount importance, but because their existence as a thing that exists at all warrants investigation, and the nature of their separateness from each other is peculiar to me. There is a strange, disinterested glue that binds them and I’m trying to work out what kind of glue it is.