touching wood 2021
Attuning bodily, sensory engagement with ecology, Touching Wood presents a series of drawing-paintings that convey tactile surfaces as visible artefacts on paper. These poetic works are created using 'Frottage' (rubbings): a drawing process that combines sense of touch, handmade paper and drawing materials to record intimate exchanges between maker, materials and surface.
The drawings were collected whilst travelling through New Zealand's South Island in 2020 and depict the range of native tree markings present in forests, coastlines and thoroughfares across Te Wai Pounamu (South Is.). The works are made with acrylic paint, graphite, wax or conte crayon on handmade paper set onto a cradled plywood panel (400x300mm).
Across the world, 'touching wood’ is a common superstition where people knock their knuckles on a piece of wood to bring themselves good fortune or ward off bad luck. Many cultures believed woods to be sacred, and that spirits and gods resided in trees. Knocking on tree trunks roused these spirits and called for their protection, showed gratitude for a stroke of good luck, or chased away demons. As touch was the sixth sense and connected to the spirit and to the soul, it was thought that the sense of touch reconnected something of the Divine in the person who was doing the touching. By contemplating the marks and the trees that created them, these works seek to rekindle this numinous connection.
