Transcription project -

The Great Turf

Albrecht Durer

1503

Sarah Holyfield

January 2013

This project involved the demarcation of a small piece of turf which was allowed to grow freely within its boundary. The changes over three years were photographed.

It was concerned with cycles, complexity, growth and change, and was a metaphor for childhood and parenthood.

It was influenced by three key pieces of work.

No intervention took place until the final stage when the growth was harvested.

The Great Piece of TurfAlbrecht Durer1503

The Great Piece of TurfAlbrecht Durer1503

Albrecht Durer selected this piece of turf and took it into his studio where he painted it. It was one of the first depictions of a wild piece of vegetation and all the plants can be identified.

Meadowherman de vries

Meadowherman de vries

Herman de vries demarcated a piece of meadow and monitored its development and growth over 20 years.

http://www.hermandevries.org/project_meadow-wiese.php

‘A line made by walking’Richard Long1967

‘A line made by walking’Richard Long1967

‘This formative piece was made on one of Long’s journeys to St Martin’s from his home in Bristol. Between hitchhiking lifts, he stopped in a field in Wiltshire where he walked backwards and forwards until the flattened turf caught the sunlight and became visible as a line. He photographed this work, and recorded his physical interventions within the landscape.’http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-a-line-made-by-walking-p07149

I was interested in this piece because of ideas behind ‘making a mark’ yet this being ephemeral.

I laid a grid of wood on the lawn and no mowing took place for two and a half years.The following photographs were taken as far as possible from the same angle to eliminate the distraction of the rest of the garden and they follow the seasons over this period.

I decided that it was time at this point to complete this work and this is the final photograph before it was time to harvest.

This photograph is a transcription of Durer’s painting, I placed a white background behind the growth to isolate it as he had done, and the proportions of the photograph are the same as his painting.

The site after the growth had been cut down and removed.

The site after it had been mowed. It can now return to being part of the rest of the lawn.

I dried the harvest and burnt it.

The ashes after the burning which was done in a cast iron

container – the colours of the rust can be seen here.

I placed the ashes where the wooden grid had been.

Another photograph of the ashes in place. I will take photographs regularly of the site to see how long it takes for the trace of its existence to disappear.

The photographs....

Although the work has been documented by photographs in a factual and flat way, I also wanted to explore making some more aesthetically interesting pictures and the following show how this developed -

Burning the dried harvest in the stove

Smoke and flame

Image cropped and black and white

Image inverted

Ashes in the cast iron stove, cropped as a square but the colours are as they appeared – I like the ambiguity of this image and it reminded me of some of Anish Kapoor’s work.

Another photograph of the ashes in place. The lines remind me of Richard Long’s work shown at the beginning of the slideshow.

The plants

During the period that the turf was growing I took samples of the plants to see how the complexity developed over time. I took photographs in the style of herman de vries – as rigorous samples but arranged in an aesthetic rather than a ‘scientific’ or taxonomic way.

http://www.hermandevries.org/index.php

April 2010

November 2010

October 2011

May 2012

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