With Other Matter

Joanne Laws

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden, you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.[i]

In his 1992 memoir, Modern Nature, Derek Jarman chronicled the creative challenges of establishing a garden in the inhospitable coastal environment of Dungeness in Kent, overlooked by a nuclear power station. Gardening seemed to anchor Jarman in the latter years of a largely nomadic life, while helping him to process his HIV diagnosis and the loss of so many friends during the AIDS epidemic. His poignant observation that “the gardener digs in another time” draws a distinction between the different temporalities of man and nature.

Against the backdrop of Covid-19, nature and green spaces became therapeutic outlets. The early weeks of the global pandemic were the stuff of dystopian fiction. International news reports showed apocalyptic scenes of mass graves and Hazmat suits. Cities became the sites of mounting contagion. Time was punctuated with daily death tolls and periodic updates from government officials, who addressed the nation with the solemnity of wartime. Human life as we knew it seemed to grind to a halt; and yet, still the flowers continued to bloom.

Amid travel restrictions, shuttered businesses, deserted streets, virtually no traffic, and noticeable reductions in pollution levels, mammals, insects, birds, and other wildlife seemed to reclaim urban habitats. As our ears attuned to the morning amphitheatre of birdsong, we began to learn of the importance of ‘rewilding’ as an intervention to restore ecosystems and slow down climate change. I remember thinking that perhaps it’s not the landscape that needs to be rewilded, but us humans. Local authorities stopped cutting verges and began planting wildflowers instead. We vowed to postpone the mowing of lawns in early summer: Excuse the weeds, we are feeding the bees.

‘With Other Matter’ opened in late January 2022 at Roscommon Arts Centre (RAC), the same week that most Covid-19 restrictions were officially ceased by the Irish government, tentatively ushering an end to the pandemic. This group exhibition brings together selected artists who set about documenting and recording the infinite strangeness of lockdown – its spatial limitations, sparseness, and lack of human contact, as well as the mundane rhythms of life, confined to one’s immediate vicinity. Collectively the presented artworks examine the materials in our environment that fold into our bodies and affect us in subtle or obvious ways. The exhibition title resonates with American political theorist, Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘vibrant matter’, which considers the agency and ‘thing-power’ of inanimate objects and non-human forces.

I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert.  In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics.[ii]

The prolonged closure of studio spaces during lockdown meant that many artists had to dramatically alter their processes to suit the confines of working from home. Indeed, a defining feature of the pandemic was the merging of professional and domestic lives, as the interiors of people’s homes were revealed to us in unprecedented ways. The exhibited artworks closely examine the familiar textures of the domestic realm, as if magnifying seemingly banal microdetails, like architraves and other architectural fixtures, that go unnoticed in ordinary life. Across the assembled works, we observe the quality of light, as it spills through blinds at dusk or sunrise, casting shadows across empty rooms. Also documented are textures of the natural world – from plant life, moss and foliage, to encroaching weeds and blossoms. The ubiquitous appearance of flowers – whether fresh, wilting, or fake – seems to act as Memento Mori, marking the tragic proximity of death throughout this period. There are further simulations of nature through the use of Astroturf as a sculptural material, while other artworks trace a slow and durational exposure to the elements.  

As the ‘charmed suspension’ of the first lockdown gave way to a merging of the biological and the political, it became clear that global pandemics are a permanent facet of burgeoning climate catastrophe, caused by unsustainable human relations with nature, such as intensive farming practices and habitat destruction. ‘With Other Matter’ provides an opportune moment to reflect on the last two years, while emphasising the role of the arts, not only in soothing existential vulnerabilities and healing that trauma, but in making visible the enormity of this period in modern human history.  

Joanne Laws is an art writer and editor based in County Roscommon

Featured Image: Ciara Roche, Saturday Morning 1012am, 2020, 15cm x 21cm, oil on paper, courtesy the artist and RAC

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Notes:

[i] Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (London: Vintage, 1992) p30.

[ii] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010) p5.