Healing and renewal

 

Gabrielle Hoad | Interloper (Infinite Stories) | Black and white photographs and archive illustrations, shown in random sequence across two digital photo frames | 2023

I'm delighted to be part of  Under / Over, an exhibition responding to themes around renewal and transition inspired by Redruth’s cultural shift from mining town to creative centre.

I'm showing a new digital iteration of an old work, Interloper. Originally presented as a single, large-scale image for Oxford Botanic Garden, the source material has been revisited and constructed as a randomised digital work to introduce unpredictable pairings of images and cede control to the nonhuman in the final image-making.

Based on the common horticultural practice of bud-grafting, Interloper examines the perceived divide between natural and cultural, ecological and technological through images of human-plant conjunctions.

“There are almost infinite stories of strange conjunctions which urge earnestly for credit,some of incisions made upon animal bodies […] there was a Spaniard lately had a bramble that grew out of his belly.”

Robert Sharrock The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature (1660)

The practice of grafting dates back to the beginning of the first millennium BCE. It allows growers to combine desirable qualities in a rootstock (such as resistance to fungal disease) with other qualities (such as sweetness of fruit) which may not be found in one plant variety alone.

 
Although the processes by which the mixed plant materials co-exist are now largely understood, the phenomenon used to provoke both curiosity and anxiety. It raises questions about the boundaries of living things and speaks to contemporary thinking about ecological entanglement.

Under / Over
G12, Krowji, West Park, Redruth, Cornwall, TR15 3GE
7 October 2023 - 22 October 2023
Open Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays 11am-4pm plus Sunday 22 October 11am-4pm

Under / Over is part of the Flamm programme 21st and 22nd October in Redruth.