growing gestures
The installation growing gestures emerged from durational botanical study and relationship-building with a set of drylands grasses which I planted, watered, tended, and drew as they grew from sprouts into adolescent plants. Throughout their first months above ground, I recapitulated their gestures of growth through my own drawn gestures, following their movements as a musical score. This score is then hand-drawn for a final repetition/performance on the gallery wall, collapsing the time and movements of growth into a single visual experience. The arrow of time within the piece flows in the same way that grass rootlets develop, starting from a central layer of cells and building circularly backward from the root tip.
The piece greenhouse time serves as a portal or entryway into the gallery. Greenhouse time is a composite image of the sky through the greenhouse windows on each day I visited, tended, and drew the grasses. Passing through this translucent curtain into the gallery space echoes the grasses' experience of looking through a filter to the outside world, and provides entry to a consolidated experience of time and relationship presented in the installation.
Photography: Tommy Bruce