Scything~Signaling
ongoing collaborations between nature and humans > tending through scything and signaling.
Shown here are parts of the Exquisite Corpus: The Maize (2016 ) site-specific actions that took place in a piece of land activated by Holes in the Wall Collective.
I brought together an outdoor installation, ritualized action, and collective encounters through the use of repurposed mirrors hung and positioned throughout the site; a fire that was never lit; a scything manifesto and scythe that marked the location of the action. Rather than functioning as a conventional exhibition, the installation established a temporary field of attention in which participants were invited to reconsider their relationship to landscape, labor, reflection, and ecological change. The scythe operates simultaneously as tool, historical artifact, and symbolic gesture, while the mirrors redirect attention between body and environment. The work extends my use of simple, repurposed materials and actions to create situations in which ecological questions are experienced physically rather than encountered only intellectually.