The Unearthings
A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
ongoing since 2014
quiet activism; community
The forest garden is an ongoing project, developed through quiet activism; an act of protest and resistance against the demands of extraction and extinction associated with perpetual growth and expansion.
The Forest Garden* Project is a proposition, a developing concept which exists somewhere between ecological research, quiet activism, ritual, experiment and performance.
A choreography of inter-disciplinarity. A space full of contradiction, where time confuses and dissipates. A site for the interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture, wilderness and order, freedom and control, and for the gathering of many different species not determined by human will; an active dialogue with living material under the open sky.
The creation of the forest garden since 2015, is an act of protest and resistance against the demands of extraction and extinction associated with perpetual growth and expansion. It develops 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.
The 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.
Location: Suffolk, UK
rural, environment, marginalisation, neo-romanticism
© Sophie Standford