Systems/Re-imaging

Theme:
As a continuation of the initial project, I have further been exploring systems, particularly postal and mapping. Which relate to place and the way in which it is ordered in visual formats.

The subject matter is my recent experience of moving house and changes in personal circumstances. I saw the aspect of relocation and change is pertinent subject matter, in addition to tension between public and private realities. Drawings on utility bills of various interior scenes, which have changed over the past few months, reflecting my everyday personal space. I also started collecting all the envelopes that bills and various forms of correspondence arrive in, including letters from family at home. These envelopes have a variety of different patterns, design to obscure the contents of the envelope. I saw these patterns as a form of code/ scrambling/ camouflage design to keep secrets. I saw this as a visual code for private situations which inverted become public.

On the theme of place I was looking at the local area that I live in. Even though I have moved four times over the past three plus years, I have stayed in the same area and postcode. I explored the idea of map/plans based on an emotive rather than geographical scale.

Whilst exploring the themes suggested in the assignment task, I started looking at the botanical drawings and thinking about plants and how they not only have always been an important part of my family heritage (on both sides of my family are a long line of keen gardeners and collectors of plants), but they form an important part of my daily life. In my job I teach students with disabilities about growing vegetables. Since moving to this house I have colonised the concrete front garden with pots of all sorts of plants. Tending these plants has given me a sense of hope and grounding about life and how to live.
I realised that some of them were indigenous to South Africa, and this got me thinking about how plants are a symbol of British imperialism par excellence. Just as the familiar plants give me a feeling of being at home, their very presence here in England is as tied up in a colonial past as my own existence and situation. Also on reading Marion Arnold’s Women and Art in South Africa (1996), I saw there was a further connection, as the earlier women artist in colonial South Africa, were restricted to painting local domestic scenes and fauna and flora by gender roles. This is an idea that I would like to explore in the future.

I have included other things that I have been working on, which do not relate directly, but are part of the process in a way.