SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT WORKING WITH PLANT MATERIALWorking with plant material is an experience that extends even to the sense of smell. The smells of dried leaves, stems, petals, etc. in their storage boxes hit you with remembered memories.
One can be led astray by the colours and forms of the various plants. It seems that it would be enough just to photograph this raw material without having to manipulate it into some final cognized work and not theorize that initial spontaneity out of it. And that is one of the frustrations of working with chlorophyll-based organic matter. It changes quickly and it's pretty well impossible to preserve this initial kick.
The initial kick is often in the gathering, or even the scouting stage, as you size up what looks like to be a particularly satisfying crop. Recent work has become more sculptural and the black locust has become a personal favourite. It's a difficult plant to locate in Toronto. Gathering its leaves can be a painful undertaking and its sharp spikes leave reminders, especially behind the fingernails. (though this task pales to Wolfgang Laib's gathering of tiny pollen for his large floor pieces - now that's discipline). These particular stems looks especially beautiful drying in string-tied bundles (three pieces in this show are black locust-based).
Spontaneity and accident (intuition) are both important aspects of my work procedure. Though I know and like some of the work of certain well-known contemporaries the jolt of recognition and spiritual affinity I feel most with is the non-leaf work of Martin Puryear, a wood sculptor. What I feel drawn to in his work is the poetry and the mysterious allusions. This to me is what leaf work should be, not just something that "illustrates" the passage of time, colour, or some other natural process. And that is a danger one can easily fall into because the innate beauty of the materials one works with can make you lazy and you could go on creating perfectly aesthetic constructions that have no poetic or transcendent resonance. This lack of poetry, and the supremacy of good design, has led someone like Richard Long to call certain of his successful contemporaries "second generation decorators". I can attest that this can indeed become a working hazard.
Environmental messaging is of little or no interest to me and in that sense it's a misnomer to call this work environmental (at least in the sociopolitical sense). Plant material happens to be what I'm working with and I have no arguments about technology, pollution, the truth of nature (at least as far as the art is concerned). I'm not even interested in the time aspect of the plant material, even though that is part of working with plant matter. I like working with plant matter, I like its fragility, its impermanence.
Ideally, what I would like to accomplish is to manipulate it so that it isn't like plant matter in its original form (and meaning) anymore but a new "ground" for contemplation, detachment and elegant thought.
Ted Karkut .
Artist's Statement . Propeller 2007
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8 Haiku, Gallery 50, November 2015
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