Turf & Twig

Abstract

In Turf & Twig solitary figures are depicted at the boundaries of salable land, performing surreal and fruitless tasks. The objects they interact with recall a manufactured domesticity that seems displaced and almost obsolete set within the outdoors. The inadequacy of these interactions is emphasized by the immensity of the wilderness behind them. Inspired by the historic “Turf and Twig ceremony”, which has its roots in the colonial, English expansion into North America, the symbolic actions depicted in these large-scale oil paintings suggest failed versions of settlement. Source images for the landscapes are retrieved from Canadian real estate websites, which advertise ‘empty lots for sale’. These open-ended narratives act as imagined histories on lots of land charged with unresolved colonial links to the past.