Thistle, Sticks and Stone is a series of sculptures made from found and salvaged natural objects. Working as a part-time gardener, I have established an inquisitive relationship with unwanted plant waste, the process of its gathering, and its re-use.

The form of a plant is naturally ever-changing, but through a gardener’s hand, it is delicately shaped and precisely manipulated. Through this manipulation, old forms are removed and discarded to make way for the new. 

In this series, these old forms are re-used to create various balancing natural elements, reminiscent of their previous intent but further manipulated beyond the grave into holistic abstracted structures: a fragmented new object. Using pruned branches and dried thistle and thistle-like flowerheads reclaimed from the waste of London gardens, the process of structural shaping is continued through steam bending and air drying. Seasonally, thistles spring from the summer earth like nature’s own booby traps. This metaphor is instead reflected in the arrangement of each sculpture, resulting in compositions that become almost organically mechanical in nature.

Every dried thistle acts as an object of alluring curiosity, ‘artifacts’ finely resting atop their pedestals of bark-stripped or carved branches, counterweighted by string-tied stones.