Catriona Towriss, The trees look at us and wonder, 2024

Time As Method

Catriona Towriss

Mezzanine & Long Gallery: 28.11.24 - 09.01.25

In Time As Method, Catriona Towriss presents a body of artwork that explores ritual and care as ways of being with land and trees. Working with deep listening, reflection and compassion, her work emerges from her desire to repair lost and damaged connections to the life-forms that surround her.

The raw natural materials used in her work draw her into the deep rhythms of earth-time, as the foraging for seed pods and materials depends on seasonal passages of water through the soil and the blossoming of trees. Journeying into the forests and mountains, the artist found in Eucalyptus a place to rest her stories. In them she finds companions that mirror her migration story and rootedness in new soils. Inspired by their abundant offerings, she sees their seeds as future books, offering her a safe and generative space to contemplate the precarity of tomorrow. In her considerations of future times, the artist has been working with the poem ‘The Broken’ by Ben Okri. The stanzas of this poem, a plea for humanity to turn to love to save our future, appear in many of the titles of the artworks and on the walls of the exhibition.

In the art works, seed pods and other tree-materials are woven together in a careful and expectant repetitive process, as the artist’s dexterous fingers string and sew, obeying the call to create. This method asks for spaciousness, solitude and all attention. Being led by time, through time and with time, the resulting artworks have carried the artist through grief, love, joy, pain, hopelessness, delight and acceptance. The artist sees this as a reminder that the journey of creativity is all about process, with artworks witnessing the hearing and telling of their creation story.

Time As Method builds on the existing collaboration by the same name, which documented the embodied ritualisation of different forms of time with artists Raquel Torres-Arzola (San Juan, Puerto Rico) and Zayaan Khan (Cape Town, South Africa), in an online exhibition on WhatsApp in May, 2023.