When I Was the Forest There Was Nothing I Could Not Love

Rubicon ARI, 6–23 November 2019

This installation gathered several existing bodies of work into a single field and generated new works in response to that convergence. It brought together banners, silk prints, ecoprinted textiles, digital works, sound and sculptural elements as a way of holding body, memory, land and return inside one continuous encounter.

Works shown within this installation included We Were Paradise, Where the Waves Begin, and newly formed pieces including Waterfall of Bones, This Is Where You Will Be Born, and Lichen Crumbles Rocks. The installation functioned as both a gathering and a threshold. Earlier works shifted in meaning through proximity. New works arrived through the pressure of their meeting.

The central concern was reconciliation, not as resolution but as sustained attention.

Bodies, trauma, instinct, nature, affect, cycles, patterning, microbial life, love and symbiosis were not separate themes but overlapping forces moving through the same terrain. The banners functioned as love poems between body and Country. Some held intimate bodily scales. Others moved at land scale. All were formed through sensorimotor listening and receptive mark making, allowing the body to respond directly to place rather than to concept.

This installation marked a deepening of my practice of returning, not only geographically but somatically and relationally. The works do not perform reconciliation. They attempt to stay inside it.

Waterfall of Bones

Surrender, This Is Where You Will Be Born, 2019

Digital print on 100 percent silk

These banners carry bodies as falling, gestural and porous. They move between birth and surrender, between skeletal architecture and fluid passage. They are not illustrations of death. They are works about yielding, about the relinquishment that allows arrival.

Lichen Crumbles Rocks

This work emerged through attention to slow, relentless processes of softening and persistence. Lichen appears not as surface decoration but as collaborator in time. Rock is not stable. Bone is not final. All things return to dialogue.

When I Was the Forest

After Meister Eckhart, 13th century

Few religious binaries amended

When I was the stream,

when I was the forest,

when I was still the field,

when I was every hoof, foot,

fin and wing,

when I was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose,

no one ever wondered was there anything I might need,

for there was nothing

I could not

love.

It was when I left all we once were

that the agony began,

the fear and questions came,

and I wept, I wept.

And tears

I had never known

before.

So I returned to the river,

I returned to the mountains.

I asked for their hand in marriage again,

I begged — I begged to wed every object

and creature,

and when they accepted,

Everything was ever present in my arms.

And the earth did not say,

“Where have you been?”

For then I knew my soul — every soul —

has always held

it within.

This exhibition sits as a hinge in the broader arc of my practice. It holds together early bodily patterning, later microbial and symbiotic work, and the ongoing labour of returning toward relation with land, memory and self.