Rhythm

I have been gardening since March. Anyone who is a professional or at least seasoned gardener would probably say I have been doing it wrong. Nonetheless, I have been keeping at it steadily since March, tending in my own way. Weird and miraculous things have happened. Some plants that were supposed to be fully grown in thirty days are still growing and never reached a stage of fruition, a stage in which I could harvest anything substantial. I planted a bunch of bachelor's buttons, flowers that grow real tall and produce blue button like flowers. I have always seen them bloom in the spring, yet it is September and the only surviving plant just bloomed with one single button. The plant is limply falling over the side of a large iron container so that the flower almost touches the ground. My compost bucket has been cooking since two Augusts ago. I have tried to use some of it but my lack of expertise has not permitted me to confidently utilize it like any gardener surely would have. I keep adding things though - egg shells, celery ends, avocado pits, and banana peels. Occasionally I stir the sludge with a stick I found in the yard. It doesn't smell bad like I always think it will upon first peeling back the plastic lid. As I investigate each plant's progress each week I try to invoke the feelings I had when I was a little kid wandering through the woods. A sort of primal curiosity as if I were looking at something entirely new, a phenomena unique to that very time and place. 

I have photographed the plants over the course of the spring and summer. I decided to find all those photographs and take new video footage, moving slowly over the plants and their habitat. I want to draw the plants and their oddities - elongated curling stems, erratic patterns of growth, and how they intermingle with each other and the surrounding area. I want to try to draw them disinterestedly, that is to say disinterested in the end result of the drawing and whether or not it will look anything like the physical reality of the plant itself. 

In my studio I am arranging another environment for these plants to be moved to. I will display them along with the drawings, photographs, and video. I believe I am actively working in a process that denies teleological thinking. I am making attempts all along the way to make decisions based on coincidences instead of making decisions based on any sort of desired outcome, effect, or meaning. The environment that I am making in the studio is made up from bits of materials that I have used in the past like re-pulped paper from an old painting and  plaster pieces from past sculptures that I still have on my shelves. The plants and the things in my studio have no predetermined relationship and I will cast them in association only because I came to them at the same time. 

(from reading response 1 - to the left of the page)