Material choice of Hall and Gascoigne's work

This work is from Fiona Hall's collection "leaf litter," a series of 183 bank notes from around the world. Each note has had its native plant carefully and delicately painted on to the exact scale of the original leaf. In this series, hall draws on the relationships between the natural world and the commercial world. Hall has purposely created an effect of transparency through the leaf to depict that while money is imperative in our society, often overriding environmental concerns, plants are often the raw material for generating this income. Leaf Litter aligns the distribution of plant species with the distribution of monetary wealth, and moreover gives a new meaning to the saying, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, as it allows the responder to question this notion.

Rosalie Gascoigne’s material choice mostly includes found objects as she stated that her art making materials “need to have been open to the weather.” Subsequently her artworks consist of iron, wood, feathers, shells, road signs and wires. However, these objects depict a representation of elements of her world. Gascoigne’s “Tidal” consists of 31 arcs, made of wood, layered on top on painted plywood. The work alludes to rejuvenation and discovery of the environment around you, as the objects are symbolic of the environment Gascoigne was in when creating the work and her mentality at the time.