Camouflage Cypress

Camouflage Cypress was produced for an exhibition about the acceptance of death as a part of life... my suggestion that we should try to make peace with the inevitability of death. The camouflage is a reference, to disguise it somehow, to our tendency to push the thought of our own death away and pretend that our lives will never end. The Cypress is traditionally the tree associated with spirituality. The medium of woollen dust is one I developed for an exhibition in 2005 and have been working with ever since. For me it is associated with impermanence...the dust we will one day become as we return to the matter of earth and regrowth. For some, the dust on the paper has the appearance of something that may blow away in a slight breeze, when in fact it is firmly fixed to the paper. In this composition the positive form of the Cypress tree can also be read as a negative... an opening in the white sheet of paper, a slash or gap through which we might glimpse another dimension.