Looking back: Interloper (2014)

Interloper | 2014 | 12-page publication + large-scale print on vinyl banner (175 x 84cm)

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Interloper, made for Oxford Botanic Garden in 2014, was a particular turning point for me. For this project, Senior Curator Alison Foster drew articles from Oxford University’s archive of the Gardeners’ Chronicle, which were then randomly matched with participating artists.

My article, from 1841, was on bud grafting, a process often used by fruit growers to propagate different varieties and species on others. Although the processes by which the mixed plant materials co-exist are now largely understood, the phenomenon used to provoke both curiosity and anxiety. The way grafting challenges the boundaries of living things led me to Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010).

In seeking antique images of grafting, I stumbled across a beautiful 1660 tome called The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature by Robert Sharrock. Sharrock carried out many practical trials into grafting and, in a neat twist, it turned out many of them had taken place in Oxford Physick Garden, the site on which I was now working.

Interloper examines the perceived divide between natural and cultural, traditional and technological through images of strange conjunctions. (The title itself is a hybrid word, bringing together Latin and Middle Dutch.)

My work, which was placed in the garden’s orangery alongside grafted fruit trees, consisted of an image on a large vinyl banner (a material chosen to withstand the garden’s watering regime), and was accompanied by an artist publication. In making the publication, the usual process of imposition, which rearranges spreads for printing and binding, was bypassed. Instead the reader has to disassemble the pages (mentally or literally) in order to obtain complete images.

Commissioned by Metron for 'the breaking of tulips' at Oxford Botanic Garden, the publication also appeared at 'Counter 2014', Plymouth Arts Centre with MCMXCII Projects, and as part of 'The Floating Library 2015', Silver Lake, St Anthony, Minnesota.

Photo: Kevin Burrell