Stumperies have long fascinated me. Originating from 1856 stumperies are gardens made almost entirely of tree root stumps arranged to form a grotto style construction that in the end is neither entirely living, nor, entirely dead; the stumps like bones, minimalist in their shape and color but intricate in their tangled sinuous forms are haunting, severed, amputated but indisputably also objects of incredible beauty, sculptural monuments to the memory of trees once large and majestic but now dead. It is no great effort to see stumperies as more akin to graveyards than a conventional garden.


When making 'the little death', I wanted to make works that embodied a similar mix of beauty and decay, forms are cropped, amputated, eroded, etched, split or cracked, but are none the less, still beautiful. These works aim to be reminders that sorrow and loss are as much a binding force for beauty as is joy; that a short period of transcendence is often achieved when a part of one-self dies, or is forgotten, in the wake of ecstasy or events more undesirable.