Miranda Whall

Join me staring at my oak tree on the hour every hour on https://www.twitch.tv/mirandawhall

In this performance I am attempting to walk into plant time and I invite you to join me.

On Wednesday 1st July I will step through the window of my lounge out into an abundant, fecund, lush green landscape with vegetables, flowers and plants jostling for space in the sun (maybe) and for my attention. I will give one of my two oak trees, the other is dead, my attention for 24 hours, 10 minutes of my attention on the hour every hour. During these hours outside on my patio landscape I hope to step out of my body and into plant time, oak tree time.

I will go ‘in’.. to my patio and veg bed, the extension of my home that has opened up to me during lockdown, as if it were a mountain. In Nan Shepherds words I will ‘walk out of my body and into the mountain’ to visit as though one would visit a friend, just to simply spend time with it, in the hope of seeing and listening, deeply .

Of course I won’t hear plant voice, and lets be clear bio- acoustics are not heard through the human ear and I am just a conceptual artist in a black polo neck, sleeping in my bivvy bag (and maybe tent) on a super lightweight camping mat for 24 hours on a concrete patio in Aberystwyth ( I wonder why we say ‘on’ a patio and ‘in’ a garden? does that mean I have even less chance of hearing vegetal speech because my ground is concrete?) but through my crawling and now staring practice I hope, aim to SLOW down, pay ATTENTION to SEE and LISTEN. My being out there for 24 hours with my oak tree, is a small gesture, which I am inviting my audience to share. It could be a truly unremarkable, astonishingly dull experience for anyone who ‘twitches’ in and lets it play out on their screens, but it could also be a profound experience to drop in and virtually share in the practice of staring at a sentient being other to a human being, in their time. To witness the simple act of just one single human being staring at (being with) one single young oak tree, a tree that could grow and live to many 100’s of years, way beyond me and the person watching. Here we both are, here we all are, in a 24 hour moment, together, in relation to each other, and that is ‘all’.

It will be boring, for me and you, how boring depends on us. I think boredom is vital and mistakingly avoided in life and in art. I love boredom in art. In Situations by MIT Press, Claire Bishop sites Andre Breton’s public excursion to the church of Saint Julien le Pauvre during The Paris Dada season in April 1921; Breton organized a tour of an atypical historical site with little or no tourist value, one that brought people face-to-face with a part of Paris that was overlooked and undesirable, the excursion attracted more than 100 people despite the pouring rain, the intended result was a sense of profound collective boredom on the part of the participants. This was an intentional confrontation with the changing definitions of the everyday in Modern culture, specifically considering the everyday in relation to an aesthetics of boredom developed by the avant-garde as an active means of combating capitalist culture. I hope it is boring because that means we will be in plant time, plant time is boring in human time, that is why we don’t wait to be in it, that is why we don’t quite believe plants are sentient, because they don’t ‘do anything’ in our time.