Birch Bridge

Birch Bridge was created on a small rural property at Fall, in Norway, during an International Land Art residency in 2014. I made the work in four sites in and around a large wooden barn that was undergoing conversion into a studio. These were: a stone ramp leading to the barn; the top story of the barn; one of the barn walls; and an external wall of the nearby house. Apart from a woollen fleece that I brought from Tasmania, the materials were all found on the site: fallen birch wood branches, hemp and brooms.

The woollen fleece enabled me to create connections with rural Norway and Tasmania as the wool industry has been important in both places. My childhood was spent in Tasmania, where my forebears were farmers and seafarers. In the barn I found a wooden pear box from Tasmania, a relic of past trade between Tasmania and Norway. This led me to use the pear box as a mould to reshape the woollen fleece, linking the present and the past.