' vibrations that matter '
Leaky language, matter-y interplays and a porous sense of place & self vibrate through India Boxall’s practice. Oozey imagery becomes the stakes through which Corrie Thomson and India Boxall’s conversation is fed.
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What first made the constellations of India Boxall’s work glisten in my eyes, was an automatic instinct that every disparate element was bursting at the seams, unable to be contained within neat parameters of my phone screen. Words wriggle out from imagery like tendrils. Homemade dye pools in the ripples of fabric. Meticulously produced fineliner drawings are loaded with familiar yet unfamiliar critters. There’s so much to see, so much to say and so many avenues to get lost in.
IB: An aspect that anchors my thinking is uncovering or illuminating the tangles between selfhood and placehood, and how an active awareness of the knots that bind the two propose a critical resonance that allows for a psychogeographic contemplation of our concurrent Anthropocene, (or Chthulucene as Donna Haraway gestures us to call it). This deeper response to self/place tangles requires me to think about selfhood as not tied to the ego or identity, but a sprawling mass that seeps into every-thing through encounters with humans and more than humans.
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(Inter)play with materials and matter of the most immediate surroundings seems fundamentally rooted in this notion of a porous sense of place and self. Boxall makes dyes and inks from locally foraged and felled plant matter. The squelchy, juicy routines followed while making homemade ink seem ritualistic. I’m reminded of this in one of Boxall’s poems from FUEL. Moments from an upbringing brimming with matter-y encounters flicker between Boxall’s words:
Spending time
or time spent
in the cave of childhood
getting to know the planet
by drawing apart flower heads
with a juvenile thumb
a whole and opaque memory
Peeled back whorls
secreting perfumed sebum,
a floral envelope
leaving a pastel frame
a-round an edge of nailed.
Coils of all things spent.