Oil and Earth

Although chance conversations are not exactly in short supply in my life, a particularly serendipitous example from last year really caught me by surprise.

As we mentally (and financially) prepared ourselves for the prospect of pouring a 30m long seat wall around the experimental garden outside our studio, Logan and I discussed the nature of the desired finish on multiple occasions – including pouring samples of differing options for the subtle stratification that we were both keen on.

For years, my mind has always returned to the patina of the wall at Ryoan-ji as the best example of the kind of anonymous non-design that I wish to see every day as I move around the garden – culminating in a conversation with the artist, Ian Jervis, about the surface of this very wall.

In a similar vein to the way in which the photographer, Wayne Barrar, has often fixed his lens on aspects of landscapes that are usually peripheral, Ian had taken a series of images (several years prior) of the wall that normally registers as the background to one of Japan’s most famous gardens.

The ‘living’ quality of the wall at Ryoan-ji has evolved according to its own unpredictable process, with oil seeping out from the clay over the course of centuries. In many modern scenarios, this kind of uncontrolled development would be seen as a problem, bringing to mind a wonderful quote by the architectural academic Mohsen Mostafavi about dirt and weathering :

“The mouth kisses, the mouth spits; no-one mistakes the saliva of the first for the second.”¹

I haven’t got to the bottom of the exact methodology for construction for the Ryoan-ji wall, which is widely described as involving clay being boiled or steeped in rapeseed oil.

Alas, our sampling process (and Health & Safety Plan) did not extend to mixing clay with hot rapeseed oil to find our own approximation of the process followed centuries ago – but we are happy that we have found a version of the anonymous quality that we admire in that ancient wall.

The images that form the basis of this journal article are provided by Ian Jervis from his travels in Japan. As with all other images on the O2 Landscapes website, ownership resides with the photographer, and these images may not be used or reproduced without the consent of both Ian and O2 Landscapes Ltd.