Enclosure

About

Nestled between paving and tarmac, brickwork and railing, plant life struggles to keep up with the rapid advancement of the human rat race and its lust for expansion. Situated on top of buildings or gated off into privatised gardens, our relationship with green space has become that of ‘want’ rather than ‘need’. Crammed into corners, out of the sun, and out of mind, city dwellers no longer live harmoniously among nature, we live above it. Green is used as decoration within our city landscape to falsify ideas of freedom. Urban planning looks at freedom as a luxury, trivialising our innate desire to hear a breeze through the trees.

It was the Romans that laid the foundations of our urban landscape in England, paving the way to its growth and empire. When the first brick was laid, our shoes were no longer muddy. Was this the moment we started to distance ourselves from our natural environment and enclosure began?

Enclosure features circular configurations of bricks moulded from soil. The humble brick, the infrastructure of empires, is composed of the land that has been covered, rejected, and swept away. The moulded bricks sit on rings of loose dirt, reiterating the circular motif of cycles of entrapment and restricted growth. The six crater-like formations vary in size and complexity, forming landscapes in the white-walled environment. The materials are elemental and wild, yet staged and controlled.