In the Forest Garden
A Rural Idyll
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
Forest Garden Project brings together In the Forest Garden and A Rural Idyll forming interconnected strands of ongoing work in various media, made in direct response to a relocation from the city to rural Suffolk. A search for the notional, romantic concept of the ‘rural idyll’, discovering a landscape 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 work produced here is not concerned with the visual elements of garden design, but the location where plants stand, the power they possess to communicate with one another, documented in the work of Dr. Suzanne Simard, 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.
In the Forest Garden is a resource, not only providing food and wildlife habitat, but also providing waste materials for alternative ecological photochemistry, following the research and guidance of Andrés Pedro in his second volume Back to Basics Extended Recipes for Ecological Photochemistry (2025), who comments that cultivating in this way becomes ‘a place of connection, to think against the grain, a place that encourages questioning authority, challenging established norms, and following one’s path.’ A site to consider that the naming of species is an act of control and an exercise of power, heavy with colonial histories. A living space which attempts to counter Rachel Carson’s lonely place of silent disquiet, in her book Silent Sprint (1962), reflecting a bewildered disbelief at the damage we continue to wreak on our natural world.
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.