Thing Blindness is an artwork comprising 277 leaves of blind embossments on cartridge paper from objects I found while walking in Coventry between September 2019 and March 2020. A process of documentation through which I was attempting to locate the character of the land, and the people and organisms that inhabit it, in the discarded objects that accumulate on the surface. Producing, through blind embossments – a term which describes the technique of squeezing objects under pressure onto damp uncoated paper – lasting impressions of their flattened shapes.

Blind embossing cleaned the objects so the result is not a cascade of white pages, but is peppered with other fragments, such as cigarette tobacco, splurged plant sap, and lots of fine grit and splinters which have become embedded in the paper.

I’ve combined Thing Blindness with another work – called Other Creature’s Homes – a series of tiny resin casts of the interior of knopper oak galls displayed at the ends of galvanised steel wire as long pins, with polymer clay larvae eggs. I found knopper oak galls on the ground in abundance and have made a lot of investigative written work and visual art about them for this exhibition. In the installation, practically they provide hooks and pins for Thing Blindness to hang on and they have a similar part symbiotic, part parasitic relationship as the gall wasp and the oak. Without the hooks Thing Blindness would fall, but without it the hooks have less relevance.