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; performing; documenting; analogue photography; film; listening; sharing
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.
In the forest garden, a world of mysterious expectancy emerges from the ephemeral, rhythmic repetition of cycles and seasons, where time confuses and dissipates, vibrant and busy with light and life. Despite its tiny size, the forest garden is wild, an alchemy of memory and dreams, a play 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.
In 2015, Standford transformed a grass lawn into a rich wealth of diverse flora and fauna; to demonstrate and promote biodiversity in the face of climate crisis compounded by industrially farmed monocrops that dominate the surrounding landscape.
Over the last few years the garden has re-emerged into the pubic discourse as a growing understanding of the effects of climate change and the state of the planet in our Anthropocene world, acknowledging the contribution gardens can play as part of a biodiverse ecology.
Standford initiated this body of work by studying the design, implementation and maintenance of a temperate forest garden - or food forest - with leading expert and author Martin Crawford, on his research site in the South West of England, UK.
The Forest Garden Project is a developing concept which exists somewhere between ecological research, quiet activism, ritual, experiment and performance. The flora and fauna collaborate in this space of contradiction, slowness and listening. Searching for the ‘rural idyll’ in places of increasing marginalisation, where the rural and industrial intersect and elide; where genetically engineered technologies turn fields into labs blurring the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic. This is a lonely place of disquiet which reflects a bewildered disbelief at the damage we wreak on the natural world.
Location: Suffolk, UK
landscape, rural, environment, marginalisation, watching, listening, documenting, sharing, community, quiet activism
© Sophie Standford