Verges: Exhibition at Golden Thread Gallery

The photographs in Verges examine the potential for everyday resistance through the growth and habits of weeds. Attending more closely to our ordinary surroundings and appreciating the familiar undermines the capitalist desire for commodity and spectacle, for the exotic and dramatic.

It is easy to feel so tightly constrained by grown-up concerns that we don’t have time to notice what we encounter every day. It becomes hard to see the opportunities for pleasure or plenitude lurking within them. Rocks and trees stop being forts, scraps of paper become just mess, and dandelions, goose grass and buttercups evolve from playthings into hostile invaders of our land.

These photographs aim to reclaim some of the freedom and creativity that weeds exhibit. They defy preoccupations with property and boundaries, growing wherever suits them, however untidy or inconvenient it is for us. Making use of tiny scraps of dirt to grow roots, weeds use ingenious ways to find spaces in hostile environments to thrive, teasing our desire for order and control. They suggest a view of nature as autonomous, rather than one in which it exists only to serve us.

Observing and recording weeds offers a playful, life-affirming perspective that resists judgmental thinking about our everyday environment and invites us to experience it anew.