Spirit Field

The Spirit Field

The Spirit Field is an evolving, site-responsive installation created in the landscape surrounding my house in Vatoussa, Lesvos. Found branches, roots, animal bones, skulls, stone, wire, dried flowers and fragments of earlier works are gathered, bound, planted and placed amongst the olive trees and dry-stone walls.

Many of the wooden forms are coated in limewash. Applying it became an almost ritual act—an anointing that transforms discarded or dead material without concealing what it once was. Branches become bones, figures, antlers and sentinels; skulls are raised or adorned with flowers. Other objects resemble votives, traps, nests or archaeological remains whose original purpose can no longer be known.

The work has developed intuitively rather than from a predetermined design. Individual objects gradually form a field of presences through which the viewer can move. Living trees and plants coexist with dead and weathering matter, while human, animal and mythological forms continually slip into one another.

At its centre is the idea of attention: the possibility that something abandoned, broken or dead can acquire another status simply by being found, tended, witnessed and given a place.

The Spirit Field is intended to remain unfinished. Exposed to the Lesvos landscape, its materials will bleach, crack, rust, decay and disappear. It occupies a shifting territory between shrine and sculpture garden, burial ground and playground—a place where absence can become strangely, and temporarily, present.