Te Palandjian

My graduate degree show series work with specific sites with meaningful ground material, examining the connection between environmental materiality and an immigrant's home land. My first series, Garden Craters, was executed in my garden in Brockley, UK, where I dug a series of three holes in the dirt, then diving the hole into two parts and spreading plaster across its surface. The looseness of ground material, acting as a natural release agent, allows me to remove the plaster casts and collect it as artifact/ documentation/ simulacra of the reflexive, digging process. My second series, Beach Craters, repeats the same process in Margate, UK, under the chalk cliffs at Botany Bay. The underpinning research of these works relates to my physical research in the desert, in the temperate room at Kew gardens, through collection of desiccated Opuntia Ficus-Indica and propagation of living Opuntia Ficus-Indica in my garden, the psychology of the archeologist, and my own ancestral heritage (in the past three generations) of forced and voluntary migration from China, Armenia, Russia, and Iran.