Heavy Grass, first shown at the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park, San Diego, in 2016, and later installed at the San Diego Art Institute in 2017, is an indoor installation using gleaned material from garden refuse. The work refers to the unseen labor of the garden, the material collected piece by piece, where the garden is also product of a highly codified, stylized image of “the natural.” The “unnatural” or undesirable natural elements, which are removed (in this case overgrown bamboo) and woven together in long portions and painted in the piece. Coating this organic material with paint and flocking is meant to bring it into a more fantastic, playful, even artificial realm complicating the dichotomy between “natural” and “artificial,” in the work.
