Altered Ground

Altered Ground is an eleven-metre-long floor-based installation made from heat-altered deadstock synthetic fur. The material was acquired following the relocation of a textile company in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and would otherwise have been destined for disposal.

Synthetic fur is already materially contradictory: petrochemical-derived fibres are manufactured to imitate the appearance and tactility of an animal surface. Through an experimental process using heat, I transform this familiar material further. Fibres shrink, fuse and disappear; areas become perforated, hardened and darkened. The resulting surface no longer reads straightforwardly as fur, instead suggesting eroded ground, geological strata, scorched vegetation or an aerial view of an altered landscape.

Installed directly onto the floor, the work occupies the space as a form of uncertain terrain. Its burnt orange surface is interrupted by a dark fissure that runs through the material, encouraging the viewer to encounter the work both as textile and as ground.

The work reflects my wider interest in increasingly unstable distinctions between natural and synthetic matter. As plastics become embedded within biological and geological environments, Altered Ground asks how we might recognise landscape when manufactured materials are no longer simply upon it, but increasingly entangled within its material formation.