Text Constructs: 2010-2021
The origins of the English word garden refers to a sense of enclosure; the oldest use of the word indicates the fending off of the ‘wild’ to cultivate a more or less safe haven. Scott Hazard’s text based mixed-media works explore how we collectively engage, understand, inhabit and exploit the land. Delving into recent and distant histories of human interaction with our environment, as well as geology, hydrology and plant ecology, the landscape becomes something that can be read. Through his work Hazard extracts and projects narratives from/onto constructed cosmic topographies to craft glimpses of fabricated notions of wilderness in the enclosed. His works feature numerous layers of paper, punctuated with geometric and organic masses of hand-stamped text, which are carefully torn or cut, spaced apart and aligned to define intimate portal-like voids and micro-gardens. The viewer has the opportunity to look ‘at’ and ‘through’ each composition simultaneously.
