Here (2015)
Momohiki (traditional Japanese work trousers), and the pruned branches of all the trees in the Fujiya Gallery garden that had stems pointing on a bearing of 280°43′00′′, towards the artist’s home in Kent, UK.
150cm x 40cm x 40cm♦
Although the other works Chodzko had made for his exhibition Channel, Rupture at Fujiya Gallery are concerned with identifying a place’s and community’s relationship with a hidden ‘outside’, ‘Here’ inverts this consciousness between artist and subject, home and away, through playing with the evolving emotional response to place, belonging, insularity and the revising of personal history.
Taking a compass bearing from the centre of each tree trunk in the Fujiya Gallery garden Chodzko prunes each branch that happens to point to a bearing of 280°43′00′′, the exact direction (following a ‘Rhumb Line’) of his home in Whitstable, Kent , UK, 10790 km away.
Chodzko, ‘hiding’ his intervention in a pair of momohiki (traditional Japanese work trousers), means that the garden, with its missing limbs, is now subtly changed forever. But like in a dream that reveals in exaggerated monstrous form what we have attempted to conceal, the amputated branches that pointed home seem to be walking their momohiki away.
See: Sketch for Here (2015)
and: Channel, Rupture (2015) [ exhibition, Beppu, Japan, 2015 ]The site of the garden has often appeared in Chodzko’s practice, usually focusing on human behaviour in relation to the garden border; what contains it, extends from it, or is excluded by it. The garden creates a new direction or guidance for the human into the world beyond it. See Untitled [boundary] (1991), Garden (2007), O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020), The Green, the Flow, the Path of the Game (2021). The speculative creation of a garden through human behaviour appears in works such as Sowmat (2007), The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause (1995), I See Through Every Image.(A souvenir for Laarni; A plantingtemplate for Belladonna seeds) 2013, …reached. So, deltoid-bodhi-leaf-shield… (2020). A garden moving beyond control appears in We are Ready for Your Arrival (2013) [ exhibition at Raven Row, London, 2013 ] and the banishment of the human from the Garden in Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (2015).
