Tong: If I, was you, be locked in a room, I will escape to the field.
Webb: That is what I always do.
Tong: You can use the long grass as material for building art.
Webb: Animals make tunnels in grass. I’ve seen a lot of tunnels.I use them to find my way when I get lost in the wilderness.
Tong: What do those tunnels look like?
Webb: We can imitate tunnels in the actual field.
Tunnels
Minnis Bay
Action/performance, 2021
Whilst on a planned walk through a footpath in Minnis Bay during the pandemic, we stopped and experimented, gently attaching the long straw grasses that were growing high toward the sky, either side of a compressed impression left by a Tractor's tire.
Our intention was to create a dialog between ourselves and the animals we encounter on walks in nature using the form of a tunnel as metaphor; a bridge that conveys a natural language of sorts, demonstrating our connection to nature, our appreciation for the fragility found in nature, between ourselves and our present relationship with nature, and one that echoed an ideal interaction.
A few days after creating the grass tunnels, I returned to the site to sit and wait for an encounter with any wildlife that might, by chance, visit and in doing so, create a dialog, initiating conversation. Upon return to the site, however, no tunnel remained - the wind had untied and broken it apart and the sun had changed the colour of the grass, baking it from green to brown.
A conversation had already occurred in my absence, between our site-specific intervention and nature itself; with nature, part performer, part witness, completing the work and erasing the trace of our activity.