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Moss depository, 2018
Details
Suspended silk army surplus parachute filled with dried sphagnum moss.
Installation dimensions variable
Location: Conservatory
Photography: Keith Hunter
Video Documentary: click here (opens in new window)
Links
Artist's Newsletter article
Mount Stuart web site
Scotsman article
DESCRIPTION
This work, like others in the exhibition to The Power of Twelve, draws on the history of Mount Stuart as a WWI Naval hospital, and in particular the use of the conservatory as an operating theatre. It consists of a suspended army-surplus parachute which functions as a repository for its filling of dried sphagnum moss.
From to The Power of Twelve 2018; new works drawing on Mount Stuart’s history as a naval hospital during World War One; to The Power of Twelve, The China Harvest, Wrong Right Hand, Moss Depository, Witness Boards II, Floating Groins/Fastened Groins, The Velocity of Drops.
research/process
The sculpture’s organic shape and colour echoes the inverted contours of a moss fruiting body releasing a seed, as depicted in illustrations from the Botanical Tables, 1785 by Johann Sebastian Müller, commissioned by the 3rd Earl of Bute. The woods around Mount Stuart are richly carpeted in such mosses. Millions of wound dressings made from Sphagnum moss were used during World War I. Dried Sphagnum can absorb up to twenty times its own volume of liquids, such as blood, pus, or antiseptic solution, and promotes antisepsis. Thus, Sphagnum moss was superior to inert cotton wool dressings, the raw material for which was expensive and increasingly being commandeered for the manufacture of explosives.
The collection of moss was carried out on the home front, predominantly by women and children and imprisoned conscientious objectors;
Bare-legged lassie[s] working for hours in the cold driving rain, more than 1000 feet above sea level, with a 20 mile run home ahead of them before they could thaw at their own firesides! Wound dressing in World War I - The Kindly Sphagnum Moss An unsung hero? Peter Ayres.
The whole enterprise might never have started and the benefits of Sphagnum might have remained unrealised if it had not been for the combined efforts of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Walker Cathcart, an Edinburgh surgeon and his friend Professor Isaac Bayley Balfour, then Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh who brought its properties to public and official attention at the beginning of the war.
The Sphagnum moss is encased by Borland within a suspended army-surplus parachute. Tragically, British airmen in WWI did not employ parachutes. In a report into the possible use of parachutes the Air Board declared: It is the opinion of the board that the presence of such an apparatus might impair the fighting spirit of pilots and cause them to abandon machines which might otherwise be capable of returning to base for repair.
