More Pupa Press
The book ‘Trail’ is part of an ongoing project investigating snails, specific sites and species within the larger area of Finlay Taylor’s practice, which is involved with notions of landscape and natural history. The ‘Search Site’ works made shortly before ‘Trail’ presented inkjet images of a hairy backed snail site situated on the Thames River. These photographic images were then eaten into by the snails, either at random or spelling out specific texts such as ‘holy land’ or ‘occupied territory’ giving these molluscs the appearance of conscious intelligence. Like the book these eaten areas carry the specific marks left by the snail mouthparts along with deposits of faeces and silvery snail trails. The images in ‘Trail’ present views of a garden with texts and marks eaten through the pages that include ‘song thrush’, a snail predator and ‘shelled’. Of course in reality these actions are being controlled, reading as both comic and disturbing as the artist attempts to control the snails actions.
