The Unearthings
A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
Developed through quiet activism; an act of protest and resistance against the demands of extraction and extinction associated with perpetual growth and expansion.
A proposition, a developing concept which exists somewhere between ecological research, quiet activism, ritual, experiment and performance. Developing in response to a search for the ‘rural idyll’ in places of increasing marginalisation, where the rural and industrial intersect and elide; where genetically engineered technologies increasingly turn fields into labs blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic.
Forest Garden Project is not concerned with the visual elements of design, but the location where plants stand, the power they possess to communicate with one another, and the way in which the space wants to function as a magical order. A world of mysterious expectancy emerging from the ephemeral, rhythmic repetition of cycles and seasons.
Despite its tiny size, the forest garden is an alchemy of memory and dreams, an interplay between artist and plants, provoking the dormant seed bank, urging new arrivals, pruning and harvesting, watching the (in)visible and listening to the (in)audible, challenging the senses with patience and adversity, chaos and order, growth, decay and metamorphosis. An entanglement in this fraught and violent world; invariably cultivating not refuge so much as discomfort.
*A temperate food forest espoused by Martin Crawford, on his agro-forestry research site in the South West of England, UK.