dimensions variable
Materials: fox, rabbit, coney fur coat arms, upholstery fixtures, logs.
While at Bledffa, sustainable wood harvesting is practised, seeing a pile of logs always takes me to all the places that wood is not harvested sustainably.
At a time of climate and species, crisis trees are being cut globally with deadly consequence. Animals are dying without their habitats.
I wondered at all the other things that are taken from woodland areas as a harvest.
For this work, the limbs of trees, are clothed in the skins of limbless animals.
These animals could have wandered amongst these tree limbs when they stood rooted.
These animals were made into the sleeves of fur coats.
These coats have been worn to clothe human arms.
In using worn fur sleeves to clothe tree limbs I am hoping to put things together that are often kept separate.
If the limb is proxy for the human arm, then in this work the hand is missing.
"Hands" is a loaded term in black African diasporan context. In America, slaves were often referred to as "hands" absenting the body.
In the Congo white supremacy, was perpetrated using the removal of hands from black people.
The idea of black bodies hiding in woodpiles is part of a particular English vernacular.
I am interested in the “standing stock” of animals and people and plants. In this work, I attempt to collapse all these things into one.
Shown in Wales