Gingy Fly, 2025
120mm
“He took a strong nail and a hammer with him and drove a nail into the tree up to the head with three strokes, dropped the hammer and walked away rapidly without looking back.” - Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston
Gingy fly (gin-gee fly), meaning fruit fly, worm or maggot in Jamaican etymology.
Thinking through the material history of yard arts, the photographs comprise of various gestural approaches to tree stubs and barks as a form of sculpture and mark making through recreating a structure found in my family yard growing up through found wood, twigs and vines (photograph one). This also involves incorporating months long decayed banana skins activated through the proliferation of gingy flies (photograph two). The photographs act as a documentation of actions without the sheer focus of my physical subjectivity as a catalyst for material and ecological inquiry. David Marriot speaks of literature that succeeds in not being written from the authors “their, there”, in other words from their “I”. It is with this in mind that the methodology of rendering the life cycle of organic material and non-human engagement is with this thinking in mind.
I continue to grow into ways of reifying unknowable knowledge and material systems. What some kind of non-meaning, as in, ideas which derive of non empirical and systematic modes of making, constitute the agentive act of ritual. Trees offer such approaches of thinking for me. They have an extensive history of being utilised and imbued with purposes of human votives and with redemptive spiritual qualities through mediation between humans and God. Trees have also functioned as a primary initiator for granting the wishes of humans.
