Pauline Borton – Artist’s Statement

I am an artist/grower exploring the ways in which art and growing have the potential to overlap and serve as safe spaces for nurturing and collective care. My ongoing journey is fostering connection and respect between self and the natural world, to nurture daily rituals and practices associated with healing, wellbeing, healthy sustainability, and regeneration.

My daily practice as a creative person, visual journalist, researcher, and archiver is informed by the role of the imagination in defining feelings about space and place. It strongly influences my lifestyle, and creative expression.

I can feel a strong connection between myself and the natural world that holds me. I am living with the land, learning from the land and being in a community. I am grounding, observing, and making stories, artworks and healing spaces. A myth or a story widens my world view, a foray in a forest humbles me and quietens my mind and an artistic process empowers me to seek agency within manmade chaos.

I evolved the metaphor of a mycelial network and use this to explore my relationship to the world around me. These sprawling tapestries across our world result in visual outcomes, practical explorations, and theoretical themes across my more recent work.

Both natural networks and social networks are meditated upon during artmaking processes and marks are made to mimic nature’s patterns. These patterns are a guiding force in coming to terms with who I am in this world, where my roots are, where I fit into an eco-system, and understanding how deeply connected we are to things we cannot see or touch.