Graeme Smith

The red, blue, the maroon in this work, come from the temperament of iron, the Earth’s abundant element that was born in the heat of a star. Scientists observing starlight know that iron is produced at the point when a star’s life is about to end. The dying star can collapse, fizzle or silently explode, sending the iron dust into space that will form the foundations of an Earth like our own.

Etymology

“Maroon, which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective marron,^[2] meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive'. (Despite having the same spelling, the meaning of 'reddish brown' for maroon did not appear until the late 1700s, perhaps influenced by the idea of maroon peoples.^[3][4])”

2. "Maroon definition and meaning". Collins Dictionary

3. "maroon". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. 

4. Roberts, Neil (2015). Freedom as Marronage. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

“I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction)

How do you see these things? Where do they live?

They live in and extend my space. They are containers for life or carriers of subjugated knowledge. They hold questions about materiality, landscape, transplanting, and dislocation.

"…A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient."

(Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction) 

This series of work is made by painting clay and oxides onto surfaces of salvaged fabric. After layers of material have built up a shell, the fabric skin is peeled off and used for another work. The ceramic islands are both landscapes and fossils of a textile. They superimpose visions of land and the intimacy of the fabrics we wear.

"When the Spanish marauder Hernando Cortez and his army invaded Mexico, they met “floating gardens… teeming with flowers and vegetables, and moving like rafts over the waters”; as they looked down on the valley of Mexico, seeing it for the first time a “picturesque assemblage of water, woodland, and cultivated plains…"

(Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden Book) 

Ikebana is an everyday art. It has a specific place in the home where it is seen, shared and remade. There is a place you are intended to see it, and way you are intended to look at it. You are supposed to focus on the opening of the vessel or the ‘origin’ of the flora, and appreciate it from the bottom to the top, watching the story the flowers are telling you. But this is not Ikebana. Here you can’t see these origins. They are out of reach. You can’t appreciate or see where this life is emerging from. The outer shell folds into an interior filled with water and darkness.