This work was selected for Summer Show Exhibition - Atkinson Gallery, Somerset UK. (March 2022)

In 2021, when in Portugal, I found a garden furniture-set dumped in a clearing on a dirt track overlooking cliff tops and the sea. It sat in a heap of other detritus next to a chopped up Eucalyptus tree and it made for a sorry sight (and site!) Just as litter has invaded nature, so too has the Eucalyptus, therefore, it is not uncommon to find entire trees cut down, chopped up and dumped. The oils found in them make them highly flammable so it’s not advisable to have too many of them near your home.

So, for an entire day I worked with these two invasive ‘species’ poking leaf after leaf of the discarded eucalyptus tree into the weave of the discarded sofa - then dragging the finished creation out onto the pathway where I took this photograph. Slight solarization in the top right corner of the image, gives the image a slightly out-of-this-world feel, again riffing on one of the themes in my work - of things being slightly out of place, of not #belonging.

Soon after the photograph was taken, a man with a van turned up and took the sofa away. He had already been past three times that day and collected up the armchairs that made up the full garden furniture set. Another man had been past too that day and collected up a mangled bicycle, “for the metal”, he said. The man wanting the garden furniture told me he was poor and could sell the items for food and fuel.

So poverty, like litter and eucalyptus is invasive and sadly it seems, all too pervasive.