“How to think about what exists outside human thought?”[1]
A nurse log is one that sacrifices itself. With its fall, the dead tree enriches the soil as it decomposes and allows for new life around it. Sometimes the roots of other trees and plants grow and develop on it. Life and death are but an alternating cycle based on the transformation of matter.
According to Bourriaud, “nature becomes inorganic when it is inserted into the cycle of human activities”. In other words, “a tree is organic until a log is produced from it”[2]. But then, what could man become when inserted into the cycle of natural processes? We lack the quality of shifting between the organic and the inorganic, because these concepts are simply categories of thought that belong to the human world. The question, then, would rather be, how to think what exists outside that world?
This is a question to which the new exhibition “Nurse Log” by American artist Nat Meade can perhaps shed some light through painting and the poetic use of allegories. In his brightly coloured and textured paintings, we observe the opposite approach: instead of cutting down a tree trunk, Meade has removed the man’s body to leave only his head exposed to nature. The heads of his new characters rest peacefully, but at the same time tragically, on the grass or inside water.
Their serene faces and entangled hair with the tree’s branches reveal not only a process of organic decomposition, but also the loss of their roots. Nature’s mercy welcomes and embraces them when they have lost the roots that connected them to the ground and have themselves become a nurse log.
In the central work of the exhibition, “Clout”, a piece of cloth hangs from a cut tree. Emerging amidst pale reddish tones are the blurred features of a ghostly figure that faces the viewer with its eyes and mouth open. What we do not see are the roots sinking into the earth. On a symbolic level, roots connect us to our foundation, origins and myths; what can replace them if not the ability to create new stories that grow like rhizomes? In another of the paintings in the exhibition, a yellow log decays while new shoots of grass appear in its hollow interior. In the background, a human face resembling a hill seems to overflow and spread out… It does so with its eyes closed and at ease, becoming something else at last: moving towards a post-human horizon.
Esmeralda Gómez Galera
[1] Bourriaud, Nicolas. Inclusiones: estéticas del capitaloceno. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora. Pág. 92. (Spanish edition)
[2] Ibíd. Pág. 150. (Spanish edition)
