Thoughts on regeneration.

The Artist's Workhouse, a collaborative art studio in Studley have launched a call for their first Open exhibition to celebrate their studios - in a former needle making factory - the theme being Regeneration.

TAW are great in that they are active, have plenty of workshops and are enthusiastic about contemporary art work. Unfortunately they are just out of reach for me to be a regular visitor, but was the Open that Dawn Harris curated in her former location at Ragley House in 2013 that persuaded me to share my work again in the first place and that felt really good, so I have an emotional interest in taking part again.

I initially felt rather cool towards regeneration as a theme. I couldn't see how I could work it in and around my current thread - something about time, land and the dichotomy of surface/superficial and beneath/depth - but then I saw that regeneration is all about time actually working - it's the active space between the past and the future. I've begun to see it as the ':' space. I'm not sure I want to think in such a linguistic way ultimately, but it helped.

Is regeneration so different to evolution? The change in evolution may not be so essential to regeneration for a part regrows but in a different milieu it must be ready to behave in an alternative manner, so its character appears unlike before, it may utilise means and methods from the new milieu, but essentially the body is the same.

The surface changes, however the essential being-ness of land remains, and returns to type, if ignored. In this case, it is not ignored, but rebuilt and remade to be useful to another type of craftsperson. I'm not sure where this leaves me and my current interest in the bones of rocks and tufts of grass - where the earth has begun to layer a crust over human activity in the land.

Regeneration now seems to be a very human quality, part of our enduring will to shape the earth. I suppose there is every possibility that the land I'm currently drawing - the covered quarry at Burton Dassett Hills - and those wooded, mossy, greened over quarries in the Peak District, will be repurposed someday. It's impossible to predict when.

Links:
https://artistsworkhouse.com