
Grafting begins with a cut.
The scion that will be implanted is cut form one context and transferred to another, where it is hoped that adjoined edges can find fusion. This publication presents the thread of a piece of work, conceived in studio for a specific site of installation but, because of the inexorable advance of a virus, subsequently grafted into another context: that of the landscape within a kilometre of my home.
The French literary theorist Jacques Derrida - who has himself deployed grafting as a thematic, aesthetic and poetic modality in his writing - reminds me that “there is no out-of-context”. The unplanned context of the landscape into which this piece was grafted (salt and tape woven directly onto rock face and forest floor) in turn embedded the work with unexpected accretions, material and immaterial. The geometric, methodical structure of the weave is infused with the organic, grounded in the earth: a graft of text and context.
Grafting involves such exchange, such inter-action between merged bodies, in a variable and contingent process, that it can yield unlikely encounters. In the context of this publication, the later images of the work also enact an exchange in their apposition, their chiral and achiral mirroring, suggestive perhaps of autografts - or grafts upon grafts: an unfolding inter-textual weave.