Exhibition Guide
Image courtesy of V Walton
One Body
Audio
Social Narrative and Visual Description by V Walton
Read Transcript
Art Object Info
To Be of the Earth is an immersive installation by V Walton, where organic life challenges the confines of the white-walled gallery. Botanicals emerge from a large cavity in the wall, sprawling over a platform of wild clay and soil. Life teems from unexpected places, transforming the gallery into an incubator for nature rather than a barrier to it.
Visual Description by V Walton
In this piece, we see a scene of a large forest floor with several small green plants framing the screen. Through the use of multiple layered images of film, we can see various transparencies. A Black person kneels down in the frame and uses their fingers to feel the soil before grabbing a short stick to dig into the ground. The scene changes. We see several layers of film that overlap. One, where is a close-up of myself digging into the earth. The other is where my body is laying amongst ferns on a forest floor. Through the transparency of the video, my fingers move soil across the screen and settle where my body is. Through multiple rounds and motions, I eventually stop and then walk away, and my body becomes hidden amongst soil and plants where I can barely be seen at all.
Ambient sound fills the gallery from One Body. We hear soil shifting and roots being unraveled and disrupted. We hear birds chirping. All these sounds work together to bring us outside.
One Body
To Be of the Earth is an immersive installation by V Walton, where organic life challenges the confines of the white-walled gallery. Botanicals emerge from a large cavity in the wall, sprawling over a platform of wild clay and soil. Life teems from unexpected places, transforming the gallery into an incubator for nature rather than a barrier to it.
Visual Description by V Walton
In this piece, we see a scene of a large forest floor with several small green plants framing the screen. Through the use of multiple layered images of film, we can see various transparencies. A Black person kneels down in the frame and uses their fingers to feel the soil before grabbing a short stick to dig into the ground. The scene changes. We see several layers of film that overlap. One, where is a close-up of myself digging into the earth. The other is where my body is laying amongst ferns on a forest floor. Through the transparency of the video, my fingers move soil across the screen and settle where my body is. Through multiple rounds and motions, I eventually stop and then walk away, and my body becomes hidden amongst soil and plants where I can barely be seen at all.
Ambient sound fills the gallery from One Body. We hear soil shifting and roots being unraveled and disrupted. We hear birds chirping. All these sounds work together to bring us outside.