Installation : Edinburgh(June 2003)
Barley growing in 6 inches of soil, installed in a room.
The work was about making connections - interior/exterior, urban/rural, western/third world and around issues of freedom/containment.
A room was filled, wall to wall, with fully grown barley, grown on the Pentland hills outside Edinburgh and moved into a room in the city.
On opening the door to the room, the smell of the barley was overwhelming and the breeze from the open window created a movement amongst the ears of corn, like the sea. On the wall, was a framed photograph of an empty car park outside a shopping center in the very early morning mist, the lines and arrows organizing the space.
For the artist, the experience of growing the 'crop', shifting it, nurturing it and living with the uncertainty of the changes and outcome, provided an opportunity to have a physical relationship with a process that the onlooker can only partly feel. The visual experience was both familiar (walking through corn fields) and surprising when the context was so changed.
A video was made of the project in collaboration with film maker Aliki Sapountzi.
