Glimpse of the Matter (2010) 2’16” extract of 8’57” digital video.
The timeless activity of working the land by hand, for apparently meagre reward, is played out in farmland, used from the Neolithic period to the present. This is one of a series of works in which attempts are made to access, perhaps impossibly, a fleetingly objective view of the stuff of the land itself, through seemingly absurd acts, as an alternative to regarding it as some kind of problematic resource. Physical labour, with strenuous effort, become key in silencing rational thought to pass beyond the mind of the agricult.
three video stills and two documenting photography