Ellen Leigh

Enmeshed

Grapevine, steel wire, couch foam and repurposed textiles

9 x 25 x 5 ft

2023

ellenkleigh.wixsite.com/website

There is a feeling of powerlessness, a sense of smallness, the world around us is

changing in ways where humankind can sense our impact on the environment without

understanding exactly how it is changing or what the result of climate change will be.

Enmeshed is a sculptural installation, a poiesis, of two systems entangled. One, an

organic adapted system, represented by wild grapevine, while the other, a human designed

system, is represented by fabric wrapped coils, large-scale threads made up from

industrially manufactured items. The grapevine depletes it's arboratic host through

constriction. Mimicking the grapevine, the industrially made materials drain resources over

time in the process of their making, and then suffocate their surroundings by an

overwhelming of them. Hastily discarded, they accumulate in the landscape, the detritus of

lost time. Neither the grapevine nor the industrially made items are destructive in and of

themselves, but they become so through a culmination, growing into something

increasingly unruly and burdensome. It is under that weight that they lay waste to the very

resources that provide for their being. Silhouettes with their shadowy boundaries correlate

to the idea of the repercussions of a system, the effects of it becoming bigger and farther

reaching than its physical presence. Enclosed within this psychological landscape allows

for a quiet moment, a breath to pause and reflect. We find clarity and meaning in the

spaces between things, we find our sense of belonging in the world, and what if we have no

longer have a place?