In the five years since I moved into a house with a back yard, Ive treated it as a kind of dirty secret. Its a place where I spend hours digging, demolishing, and watering things, guiltily, while feeling I should be doing something else. But it has also served as a kind of therapy for the great amount of anxiety I carry with me through life.
As the lockdown began, I found myself yearning for a sense of structure. I had very few responsibilities, but it was spring, and the plants were beginning to grow. I started waking up before dawn and spending the early morning outside, cutting, stacking, and precariously pinning together mismatched materials from the yard in the hope that they would remain tethered long enough for me to compose a picture, before falling to the ground. Building and photographing these temporary sculptures became a morning ritual. I had to finish before the wind came in from the bay and the rising sun wilted whatever blossoms I had chosen to clip.
I started inserting surveillance cameras into the sculptures, imagining they possessed the optics to return my gaze. As I faced them with a moan or a scowl and documented their growth and transformation, they in turn recorded my movements and gestures.
It was with a rebellious spirit that I navigated this lockdown space, pushing my suburban yard and material possessions to the limits of what I knew them to be, composing image creatures that disappeared in the space of a day. As the summer wore on and the mornings got shorter, my garden grew drier, and my shoots became less frequent. I struggled to hang on.