Jodie Carey: Earthen
The Artist’s Garden, Temple Terrace, London, UK
theCOLAB is proud to present Earthen, a major new commission by sculptor Jodie Carey for The Artist’s Garden, the world’s first sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists, realised in partnership with Westminster City Council.
Earthen comprises a pair of monumental sculptures which emerge from the earth as both archive and monument to their own intense process of creation, the untold stories of the nameless women ‘weeders’ and to the timeless link between earth, labour and human creativity. Earthen marks a significant development in Carey’s work: these are her first large scale, in the round, earth cast sculptures.
Earth casting is a physically grueling process. Made entirely outdoors on an exposed hilltop, over the winter months in the earth of Battle, East Sussex, each vessel was cast in the ground, using a hand-built forma, which was bound and wrapped with cloth and thread. Stitching, binding, patch-working, all detail the final surface before the form was buried under tons of heavy clay rich soil. Once removed and by climbing inside the three-metre deep void, the detailed imprint was cast from within. Carey says, “By choosing to cast directly in the earth, these works bear all the traces of the land in which they were cast; remnants of soil, stones and plants roots all absorbed during the process. Here the land is an active component in the making. The earth is not just background. It is active—it shapes, it resists, it remembers.”.
The work was conceived in response to the site of the Artist’s Garden, as a monument to the women ‘weeders’. Recorded in palace ledgers since the 1500s, they weeded formal gardens including that of Arundel House, over which the Artist’s Garden partially lies, and which displayed England’s first classical sculpture collection. The names of the weeders are not recorded, the time and physical energy they spent undertaking their vital maintenance work unremarked, their sufferings untold. Earthen stands as a monument to the emergence and reappraisal of women’s work and celebrates their timeless resilience.
Earthen draws on the universal history of pots, used in all cultures across the world since the dawn of civilisation. Pots serve as functional, ritual and symbolic objects and are conduits for complex narratives about gender, class and equality. In Carey’s hands, the pots become monumental, defying the domestic and decorative connotations associated with gender, cloth or craft. Towering and weighty, their surfaces reveal imprints of fabric, stitching and seams making visible the persistent, invisible labour of women.
Claire Mander, Director of theCOLAB says, “Earthen is a feat. Evoking the earth as both material and metaphor, its subtle monumentality reclaims space for untold narratives of women’s determination and refusal to give up. It celebrates the women ‘weeders’ who worked in the palace gardens which lie under what is now The Artist’s Garden and all women who have since the beginning of time stitched, woven and resisted through making.”
Jodie Carey says, “Earthen echoes the immortality of standing stones and suggests a primitive connection with the substance of life. Earthen is the most challenging project I have undertaken to date and I am extremely grateful to theCOLAB/The Artist’s Garden for all of the trust and support given throughout the project from start to finish. This incredible opportunity has allowed me to develop my practice on a completely new scale and opens the door to a whole new body of outdoor work, which is very exciting and inspiring.”
