Lydia Rosenberg: lawn

To create lawn, the artist collected real grass blades and pressed them between the pages of a small hardbound book of love poems by Emily Dickinson. After scanning the recto and verso of each blade of grass, they were separated within a softbound copy of “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy. The scans were then enlarged, printed, hand-cut, reassembled, painted around the edge, and given a wooden and metal base resembling a high heel, blade hilt, or a piece of framing hardware. The original blades of grass were laminated to be preserved as bookmarks for a “bibliography of grasses,” a collection of books containing passages describing grass or lawns. Each blade of grass from the source lawns and the artist’s lawn maintains its sharp, un-mowed point.

The artist's handmade lawn, artificially engineered ‘real’ lawns, natural components within a living lawn, and the "bibliography of grasses” converge to question which iterations are organic or fiction. Playfully complicating these multiplicities is worm, a singular growing sculpture of an earthworm first created in 2016 as a manifestation of the anxiety-ridden narrator of Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow.” worm finds a new environmental context in lawn, which mirrors the materiality of its collected, constructed, blended parts and expands its narrative potentialities.