Sage Martens

*180 copies limited edition*

Did you know, a clean-cut lawn is a desire we inherited from the British? 

Yes, the British dumped this pleasure into our collective consciousness. Those humorless Victorians who enjoyed having their black pudding on the lawn. They came to this uninspired impression while mis-looking at Italian paintings. Yes indeed, while gazing at these paintings they mistook green lanes for green lawns. Thus it became hip. Every stuffed truffle commanded his gardener to cut the grass.

As a result, this Victorian lust for sterile gardens with pretty green lawns nudged our world into water spillage and pesticide clouds. This new priority produced exhaust fumes and prudish monocultural landscapes.

Just by looking at Italian paintings.

As with most of Western history, the practice was exported to America and then turbocharged. By shearing clear the prolific brush of pastures, prairies, forests and glens, biodiversity becomes an aesthetic casualty with long suffering ecological ripples.

An inherited practice narrows the bandwidth of experience.

And so, the childhood habit of humming along in key to the drone of a gas-powered mower while trimming a suburban lawn extrapolates into something expanded; an unanswered question about the harmonics of landscape practices.