Site number: 102222
By Gareth Stevens
Kenton Lowe, the director of blackShed Gallery is always keen to swerve from the script. He always does things a little differently. Site number: 102222 is an unusual exhibition for many reasons, not least because it grew out of a participatory workshop that began in February.
After getting approval from the Parish Council and the Woodland Trust, the way was clear for a unique project in Springfield Woods. Enter artists Martin Brockman and Jim Roseveare who led a diverse group into these woods that surround the gallery, to teach and demonstrate traditional woodland skills. These included simple tool making, tree identification and forestry care. Along the way the group selected natural materials to make organic pigments and dug woodland clay which together were processed using crude firing techniques.
Subsequently Jim Roseveare became the gallery’s artist in residence and began to use the exhibition space as well as the woodland site to develop the exhibition which blackShed now hosts. Site number: 102222 has been in development for the best part of 2022. Neither artist nor curator had any preconceived idea of the end result, but both savoured a close working relationship, and every time I spoke with them it was clear that this unpredictability and riskiness drove them on.
Springfield Woods
CREDIT: Alexander Brattell
Jim is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. He has exhibited extensively in London, nationally, and internationally over the last twenty years. His experience of working as an arboriculturalist for thirty or so years means that he has a profound understanding of the ways humans and their culture relate to nature. His work is essentially a meditation on impermanence over imperceivably long-time spans. Human technologies, extraction processes and materials manufacture have developed to provide us with the notion that we are in control of the natural world … but ultimately our dabblings inevitably decay, and return to the earth. He tells me, “I continue my tree surgery partly for financial reasons but also for what it brings to my artwork. That is a strange mix of destruction and renewal, from the adrenalin rush of felling a large tree to the reward of considered pruning.”
He sees tree surgery itself as an, albeit more utilitarian, form of sculpture that runs in tandem with the constantly changing cycles of growth, dormancy, decline and decay.
Roseveare’s art incorporates concrete, organic materials and debris swept from surrounding ground surfaces. The very fact that this exhibition will not only be hosted in the gallery itself, but also in surrounding woodland embodies the very core themes and concepts that have preoccupied the artist throughout his life.
It was a joy to spend a few hours talking with Jim. Hearing him speak is to experience deep humility and pure authenticity. If there was ever an artist who genuinely uses his work to make sense of the world, then here he was. “The older I get the more I think of the idea that the natural world has its own self will. My work is at a junction between us and this thing we call nature”.
The exhibition is a physical manifestation of his ideas. Inside the gallery there are two huge monolithic sculptures made from woodland clay. Precariously balanced, they are gradually changing. Grass is sprouting from them and as they dry their surfaces mature and crack. In the adjacent woodland site, there is a powerful sculpture made from hand hewn bricks which will, over the seasons, give birth to new life as they merge back with the earth.
• Site number: 102222 runs until 19 November. theblackshedgallery.org.uk
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