Exhibition 74 – To Continue Walking is by Selena Chandler and features a patchwork of plant dyed recycled cotton and builders bags
Selena Says: Looking from the window of the train I watch the world go by – these are spaces I have walked, cycled and travelled through for years. Big skies, the green and ragwort yellow, water laying in the dips, beans and grain, the hovering kestrel, pillboxes, horses, creeks and towns – change is a constant.
The appearance of oblong shapes in the fields, the black plastic membranes, the turning of clay, and the clear signal of the significant change in process; the enclosure by silver fencing.
This work, To Continue Walking, remembers paths across the Essex landscape; a county which in contrast to popular views is still, (holding on), largely rural, with much prime agricultural land.
This is space that has been shared; where feet can feel the soil as dust and squelch, can connect with warriors, farmers, gleaners, artists, ramblers. Land that has been walked for generations; to work, to play, to defend.
In making this work, informed by walking, I think about reduced horizons, the smooth and the ragged, the presence of water, the growing of food, solitude, quietness, wider nature, the loss of communities, what is a home, a sense of time and space.
I wonder how the feet of the future will access the knowledges being cemented underfoot.
Selena Chandler is an artist rooted in Essex; its land and river scapes, its social histories and knowledges. Her practice draws on heritage crafts and is concerned with the sharing of domestic and trade skills, the languages of making and consideration of connections between past and present.