axis mundi

Site-responsive installation | ArtFarm, County Galway, Ireland | Autumn 2022

Created during a month-long residency at ArtFarm in rural Galway, this site-responsive installation began as a quiet encounter: a rusted steel wheel from an old tractor, half-swallowed by the branches of an ancient tree lining the drive to the property. Rather than remove it or leave it as a relic, I chose to intervene gently—to acknowledge the collision of human residue and natural persistence by stitching them together. Over several days, I tethered the wheel to the trunk of the adjacent tree using ordinary cotton string, wrapping the threads with the same methodical attention one might apply to mending cloth or binding a wound. The lines of string formed a delicate radial geometry, a kind of web stretching between living bark and abandoned machinery. As the network tightened and coalesced, an unexpected alignment emerged: the composition began to take on a symbolism of its own, marking the meeting of planes, of human gesture and arboreal growth, of the temporal and the eternal. Each strand marked a point of contact—an act of care, repair, or complicity—suggesting both reverence and restraint. This gesture did not aim to restore the object to use or disguise its decay. Instead, it made visible the relationship already in motion: the slow reclamation of human-making by the land, and the continual rebalancing of artifice and nature. The work exists fully only in situ, suspended between growth and rust, gesture and disappearance, vulnerable to weather, wind, and time.