At our latest community session, we had the pleasure of working with ecologist and nature advocate Tiffany Wallace. It was interesting to hear how Tiffany uses drawing as a way to understand the details of plants. In her field book, she shared lots of different examples including root systems… Which root system are you?!
Are you a tap root, which holds most of it’s energy under the surface?
Are you like adventitious roots? They make the most of their environment and clump together the soil around them
Perhaps you’re more of a corm (blub)? They are like the tap root, with a big internal system to retreat into, but have some short adventitious roots
Or you might be a rhizome. They operate on the surface, with multiple ‘arms’ of roots, so that if one gets cut it can continue growing
We were also joined by Lara Houston, a researcher from the Creative Practices for Transformational Futures (CreaTures) project, which has been supporting the project this year. Tiffany was our last guest facilitator, bringing her scientific perspective on the plants and places we’ve been exploring recently. In our next session, we’ll be bringing all the ideas and inspirations from visiting facilitators Ligia Macedo, Holly Sandiford, Jacques Nimki and Tiffany Wallace together, and designing a series of public events for May – watch this space!
Our latest community session was led by artist Jacques Nimki. Jacques has a long-time fascination and admiration for ‘weeds’, and uses them as a way to read the world. During our walk, we were talking about the irony of gardening – how non-native plants are grown in nurseries (often using landscape-destroying peat) are sold and planted into ‘unnatural’ places. Whereas native plants are seen as invasive or problematic when they self-seed and thrive
As we noticed the plants growing in the margins, the group drew parallels between the way people overlook and mistreat homeless people – by walking by them on the street – and how people relate to weeds. What we see as ‘natural’ is often an artificially controlled and gardened landscape, such as the planted visas of Capability Brown or the council-maintained shrubs we found along the streets, housing estates, riverside and industrial units. We went exploring along the plants found along the edges and verges, and recreated their colours back at the studio
In our second community workshop, artist Holly Sandiford was our guest facilitator. Holly is a very experienced facilitator of arts, nature and wellbeing projects. She guided us with generosity, sharing lots of ways to connect and explore
We visited the cemetery again (it’s a popular spot!) to try out a range of sensory looking and drawing approaches. It was so lovely to have lunch outside, to smell the moss, walk barefoot and bask in the Spring sunshine. Later on in the session, the group started coming up with some ideas for what they will lead for the public in May. Already, there are a series of rich and thoughtful ideas emerging…
We started our community workshop series this week, facilitated by Ligia Macedo. Beginnings can be difficult, but Ligia is a friend of the project and her activity last year was received with a very warm and positive response, so we knew we were in safe hands!
Ligia facilitated a creative writing workshop themed around Inside Out and Outside In. We explored different ways to connect with our internal feelings and external surroundings – and expressed these through written and spoken words. We walked to the cemetery (a favourite spot from last year too!) to experience the “calm” and feel “untroubled”. Before writing a collaborative poem and a private text to ourselves of how to hold onto feeling “serene” in nature, when living in a “chaotic” world
Collecting words and thoughts, at Great Yarmouth CemeteryInside Out and Outside InWalking, exploring and looking, at Great Yarmouth CemeteryFinding the JOY in nature!
This is the poem we created collaboratively, after collecting and selecting words through the session:
Today the Trash <-> Treasure project exhibition opens at Anteros Arts Foundation, Norwich. It’ll be open until Saturday 26th February 2022 and includes artwork produced by the UK artists in the residency project supported by British Council. Over 5 months, 8 artists in the UK and Malaysia took part in a postal exchange of ‘trash’ as the starting point of a cultural exchange. The exhibition features work by Caroline Hyde-Brown, Nur Hannah Wan and myself, plus UK-project lead, Ummi Junid
Inspired by the experience, I created a series of Cyanotype photographic prints. They feature beach-combed materials across the continents and weathered marks of rain and hail, and were washed and processed with collected seawater. At the exhibition, I also curated a selection of the rubbish materials we received in the UK at the entrance of the exhibition space, to set the context for the experiments we then went on to explore
Are you a tap root, which holds most of it’s energy under the surface?
Are you like adventitious roots? They make the most of their environment and clump together the soil around them
Perhaps you’re more of a corm (blub)? They are like the tap root, with a big internal system to retreat into, but have some short adventitious roots
Or you might be a rhizome. They operate on the surface, with multiple ‘arms’ of roots, so that if one gets cut it can continue growing
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