disruptus was inspired by Colin Coutts’ desire to investigate his own engagement with a familiar place. This body of work was created from stills, video and audio, recorded on location in the artist’s own garden in London’s East End.

In England, the domestic garden could be considered a civilised representative of the natural world, within whose confines we strive to impose a semblance of order. From it, we anticipate physical and mental succour. Within it, we create a sanctuary from where we can safely define our dialogue with the outside world. Although the garden may appear to be full of only vegetation and prosaic detritus, it also offers other crops, ripe with liminal meaning. But despite our best attempts at control and containment, the notion of the garden remains porous, and its boundary, when breached, is a reminder of our own vulnerability.

The red fox is, in increasing numbers, embedding itself as an inhabitant of our city space: vulpes vulpes arouses mixed reactions, but culturally, we admire this refugee as the embodiment of guile and cunning. Using the trope of the urban fox, disruptus was created to explore our comfort in nurture, idealisation of nature and fear of the wild.

At a time where humankind and nature are poised to wreak mutual havoc, much of Coutts’ work is rooted in our precarious relationship with the earth. From his architectural background, the artist recycles the building blocks of light, space and form for use in his image-making. More recently, the possibilities of digital capture triggered his transition from creator to recorder of environments. Coutts currently works and consults in photography, video and digital technology.