Image courtesy of Oisín Tozer.

Apsara Studio is proud to present A Brightness at the Edge of Things, the first solo exhibition in London by Oisín Tozer.

Oisín Tozer’s first solo exhibition in the UK occupies a former fireplace shop. The setting is significant. Traditionally, fireplaces are where wood, coal and turf – vegetal matter in varying states of decay and fossilisation – are transformed into heat and light via the chemical process of combustion. Energy from ancient sunlight, absorbed by chlorophyll, is reborn as fire; carbon trapped for up to millions of years is released into the air; the room becomes warmer, more welcoming; and the climate edges infinitesimally closer to collapse.

These walls, across which one can easily imagine shadows being wrought by the play of flame, are home to a pair of carved, site-specific murals, one at the front and another to the rear of the gallery. Unlike the vegetal matter combusted in fireplaces, Tozer’s works depict living, even flourishing things: fragile, abundant weeds. To make these pieces, the artist first collected, identified, photographed and sketched the weeds he found in the gallery’s courtyard. Growing in the cracks – on the edges – they form lines of frothing green that soften, perhaps subvert, the cobblestones’ linear patterning.

Tozer’s interest in weeds stems in part from their often rhizomatic stem systems. Following Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes (decentralised, resilient, multiple) symbolise resistance against regimented power structures: verdant grassroots energy disrupting grids of grey. By affording these plants a scale and treatment historically reserved for historical or mythical – that is to say, anthropocentric – themes, Tozer further questions dominant systems of human value. Weeds thrive at the edges of things, railway sidings, vacant plots, the scattered tracts of common land that remain after centuries of enclosure and privatisation. They speak of wildness, the release of trapped energy. By placing weeds at the centre, Tozer’s work brings to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s adage that ‘a weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered’.

Tozer formed composite images of weeds and carved them into false walls, the dimensions of which directly respond to the gallery. Made using a woodblock cutting tool, the edge of which brightens when sharpened, each vertical incision cuts into the birch ply. The white surface of the smaller work – the first the viewer encounters as they move through the gallery – suggests the bleaching effects of noonday sun and blends more seamlessly into the surrounding, white-walled gallery. The matt black of the second and larger piece, installed in the conservatory at the rear of the gallery, recalls the soot that accumulates in old fireplaces and chimneys. In both murals, vertical lines evoke flickering instants – incandescent edges – that evoke the fleeting quality of life while also, and more literally, recording moments of artistic creation, some delicate and others more violent. The mark that coaxes an image of a plant into life would be enough to cut a living specimen down.

While Tozer’s work doesn’t comment directly on the conditions of the Anthropocene, it might be understood in its double-edged context. To confront the scale of ecological loss in the present era is to question what may outlast our self-destructive species, to see life in the context of death – ‘the force that drives the green fuse through the flower’, as Dylan Thomas put it. Plants evolved millions of years before us. They will likely outlive us, too. The chippings scattered on the floor in front of each mural attest to what endures in the wake of destructive activity.

In the first room in the gallery, a constellation of taut silver wires strung between floor and ceiling picks up the thematic concern with light for the material’s association with photography. The work also points to the influence of Fred Sandback, whose yarn sculptures delineate geometric volumes of air, heightening viewers’ attention to their surroundings, particularly negative space. Two canvases coloured with chlorophyll, meanwhile, bring to mind artistic practices which do not seek to overcome but rather make a feature of decay. We might think, for example, of Shelagh Wakely, who gilded fruit that rotted over the course of an exhibition (while still retaining its golden lustre) and scattered powdered turmeric over the floor, its pungent fragrance fading with time. At the start of the exhibition, Tozer’s chlorophyll canvases are a deep, unmistakably vegetal green. By the end, that vibrant colour will be subdued.

The show’s title derives in part from ‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney, a pivotal early poem in which the young writer compares his labour with that of his father, writing lines with digging potato drills: ‘He rooted out the tall tops, buried the bright edge / deep to scatter new potatoes’. Like Tozer’s mark-making, writing and digging are acts of linear cultivation. The poem later references the turf that Heaney’s grandfather cut from a bog. In 2022, Tozer’s home country of Ireland banned the commercial sale of peat, which stores vast amounts of carbon. Travel almost anywhere in rural Ireland, however, and the boglands are littered with heaps of drying, brick-like sods. The bright edge of the shovel cuts through millions of years of trapped energy, its chlorophyll-green decayed to carbon-black.

If Tozer’s work seems to evoke processes of decay, they also point towards regeneration – the light released by burning, the species that survive. In the wake of atomic bombs, weeds grew across the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same was true in London after the Blitz. In an email to me, Tozer said that the weeds depicted in these murals – plucked from just outside the gallery – include couch grass, herb-Robert and chickweed. As will not be obvious to those who walk across them, these weeds have long been used in European folk medicine, to soothe the skin, aid digestion, and reduce fever. A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered – or, perhaps, forgotten.

Text by Patrick Langley