Miniature Thickets...

[09:37, 08/02/2025] Tom: Miniature thickets
[09:55, 08/02/2025] Tom: Growing from a solid base? Hiding things - traces? Signifiers?
[09:56, 08/02/2025] Tom: Solid back? More solid side? Gaps and strands
[09:56, 08/02/2025] Tom: String soaked in plaster?
[09:57, 08/02/2025] Tom: White? Grey? Brown? Mottled? Painted?
[09:58, 08/02/2025] Tom: Steps? Windows? Bricks? Rubbish?
[09:58, 08/02/2025] Tom: Plastic/glass front?

I have a strange urge to make miniature 'thickets'! I don't know exactly what form they would take, but they would capture the feeling of crouching down to peer into the interior of a thicket.

For anyone who has not been lucky enough to peer into a thicket, the experience is one of peering through the leaves into a hidden world of stems and clearings of bare ground inside. The canopy forms a miniature world of uncertain scale. A cathedral of stems holding up a roof of leaves.

The urge is strange and strong. For me such thickets have strong associations with my childhood in Cornwall, but also my current interest in history, which often sees me peering into the undergrowth, in search of odd traces of the past - bumps, hollows, a crumbling right-angle of concrete. These places speak of concealment, of traces of the past, of portals to other worlds, of miniature forests of uncertain geography.

I don't know how I want to model these 'thickets' as such - I want to evoke the feeling without creating a weird empty diorama. I want this to be an artistic interpretation, not a literal model. I think they will be cubes containing some form of dense 'web' of strands, perhaps 'growing' in organic clumps, perhaps concealing some form of 'secret'. I'd like to cover each face with glass, but I don't know if that's doable.

Current thinking is to experiment with some form of plaster creation - use a cube mould, and then perhaps drape string soaked in plaster into it. I'll do some experiments and see... I could potentially borrow an idea from 'Reaching Through' and place the cube, which glass tacked to the open sides, into a bigger mould and cast the glass into place (obviously placing something like clay over the middle of each pane to leave an open 'window').

This idea sort of jumped me... But actually has some clear ancestry into 'Reaching Through', into the undocumented experiment with creating epoxy cubes with plaster inclusions, into the branching forms of the Growth Simulation pictures I've been posting on Insta, into the 'holey face', into the uncompleted plaster 'industrial ruins' I keep starting and abandoning... I like that I am becoming more and more aware of the connections between my seemingly disparate pieces.