March 2024
Premio de adquisición Fundació Carmen & Lluís Bassat
Between the Greenbelt and the Rest brings together various strands of my artistic practice, beginning with the first concrete postcards in 2020, following through to my most recent solo exhibition We, the Body (2022) and its use of found and discarded materials, and leading forward to my current project, Viriditas.
In 2020, my concrete work began as a desire to create with a material that so often recedes into the background of our daily existence, becoming practically invisible. This disappearing is particularly striking when we note that it almost ubiquitously forms the main infrastructure of our urban lives. Concrete literally paves the paths upon which we walk and enables our everyday living but in doing so can easily be overlooked. So on a purely material level, there’s a beauty we can bring into the foreground. It offers differing mark-making opportunities, depending upon humidity, mix and, to a lesser degree, application. It can capture a sculpturality even when used in painting, it can appear to flow even when solid. Hung upon a wall, it seems to defy gravity.
Concrete use is also riven with socioeconomic contradictions that bear noting. It is the material of rapid industrialisation, of infrastructural development, it runs right through modernist architecture and ideology and all its complexities, and as the cheap substance of the industrial world it has become a tool of enormous and often ruinous financial speculation, all the more alarming because of the ecological harm its overuse can cause. And these inherent contradictions are what drew me to its use, both in paintings and sculpture, but principally via my concrete postcards.
Because don’t we live such contradictions everyday? I am an urban dweller practising land art but so rarely find time to step beyond the city limits, an administrator for a climate activist movement and a user of concrete, and for good or bad, I can be somebody who is overly frenetic in thinking and action, a bookseller who can find reading a challenge and a painter far too eager to wait for the paint to dry.
For a long while, I would explore such contradictions through the use of found materials – bricks, wood, tiles, shells, logs – often broken and mainly discarded, quietly sitting with the objects in order to ‘ask them’ what intervention might be required to lift these forgotten items to art. This was a way to calm my nerves, focus on this thing, be here and now. Such work formed a large part of my solo exhibition We, the Body (2022) and formalised an interest in non-human time frames and setting the stage for my most recent project.
While Viriditas (2024) emerged from these formal practices, it also began as an attempt to work with the identified contradictions, or into these identified contradictions, from a radically different conceptual angle. The term itself is taken from the mediaeval Benedictine saint Hildegard Von Bingen, who saw the greening of life, plant life, as the meeting point between God and man, the universal and the mortal, a role traditionally ascribed of course to Christ. Whilst Viriditas is by no means a religious project, I am fascinated by this proposal. It is an act of faith that sees growth, greening, as an inherent tendency towards life written into the fabric of the universe, and thus that which unites universal laws and the mortal temporalities of the lives we live, polar opposites no longer, but intertwined. Hildegard Von Bingen believed in a strict regime of song, work and prayer in order to do service to Viriditas, and at the beginning of the project, I became focused on a meditative routine of collecting, masserating and painting with lichen (a ‘found material´ that is one of the planet’s most ancient forms of plantlife). It is a slow and repetitive process, building up layers of green, and soon the old contradictions began to emerge. My frenetic nature, my scattered focus, my desire to throw paint and concrete. It was actually while reading the ‘anti-memoir’ of M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here, that I came to a realisation about this so-called contradiction in myself and it changed the direction of Viriditas drastically. M. John Harrison describes a childhood spent playing in the areas between newly made British ‘greenbelts’ and the outer zones of industrial expansion, those no-man’s-lands of disused materials-glass, brick, concrete-that sit just beyond the recently built housing estate or office block. It struck me that not only had I shared these childhood experiences, had these environments been the backdrop to my childhood imagination, but that I had completely forgotten them. Concrete use, the fascination with the discarded, but also my desire to paint with natural materials: it came together. I want to create between the greenbelt and the rest.
And so my project for UVNT returns to the form of the concrete postcard, expanding upon the play with concrete itself whilst integrating coloration and painting with mainly natural materials: lichen, bark, moss, wax, soil, stone, rust, chalk. There are unique effects that occur when lichen meets wet concrete, turning from green to russet, or is flamed along with wax, all formally embodying the twinning of what might be otherwise seen as mutually exclusive materials. Points of life among the hardened concrete. We also find four pieces that perhaps typify the extremes within the collection. Two lichen pieces from Viriditas sit alongside two works that use entirely urban detritus on concrete: glass, brick, plastic, dirt.
Between the Greenbelt and the Rest is, therefore, a parallel practice to my upcoming collection, one that attempts not so much as to resolve my artistic, personal or even spiritual contradictions but to allow them their free play and fullest extension.
Terry Craven, 2024
IG: @terryacraven
