Field Study's Man in E17 is lost on the trail of a deconstructed wellington boot for arts sake

'Nature Culture' at The Makers Yard

Field Study's Man in E17 is busily deconstructing a wellington boot for the purposes of an artful exploration of nature as a force of culture. He hopes the boot will be fully deconstructed in time for the installation on Thursday evening at The Makers Yard, for 'Nature Culture', a group show curated by Yvonne Overton and Danielle Michalitsianos.

The field student suggested using a boot 'fragranced' by the compost delivered to the allotment site on Thursday - a very large pile, perhaps nearly 10 tonnes of very hot and extremely smelly composted but not fully composted municipal food and garden waste. The boots were thoroughly infused with the putrid odours and thermophillic miasma of the pile come bacterial pyre after a full afternoon of tramping in and about it.  Even tonight, Tuesday, the entirely superficial dandelionesque field student found himself caught in a thermal emanating from the burning heart of one of the dark un-compost heaps, his vision fuzzed by the forces of labyrinthine appetites far too dark and mysterious to be illuminated by his limited logic. A fuzzy aerial vision of part of the allotment garden was relayed swiftly back to Base Camp Beere. A less smelly boot was selected for deconstruction to reduce fuzzyness and add some clarity. Let's hope a clearer picture emerges in the delights of The Makers Yard.

    

Allotment 22nd May 2013

To the left of the image above is the multi-bed potato patch, being cultivated via a no dig, compost and straw mulch process. Our question and increasingly fraught dilemma is whether or not we should use such a raw compost to 'earth up' the potatoes. The potatoes are growing up with a force we welcome (in part) and are in awe of as we struggle to provide a growing culture for them.

Potato bed - 22nd May 2013

Field Study's Man in E17 has imagined himself as a welly booted Theseus. It was not a ball of string that Ariadne gave him to retrace his path out of the cavernous stinking mountain of bull. Instead, Ariadne brandished a pair of scissors and demanded the mythical field student hand over one of his boots. She told him she could make the boot long enough to reach the bull of the bull and so back again. The last she saw of the mythical field student was him hopping into the darkness of the bull, trailing his navigational aid of a deconstructed wellington boot. Will the boot be long enough by Thursday?