I look towards regenerative practices and alternative ways of living as a means of responding to environmental crises; whilst also deeply questioning what it means to be ‘self-sufficient’. How can we, in seeking self-sufficiency, facilitate a deeper ecological questioning and reskilling that is spiritual, interdependent, healing and belonging?
Our need for food and water frames one of the most elemental dynamics we have with nature. At a time where climate change threatens this relationship at a mass scale; food is critically entangled in various scales of the cultural, environmental and existential.
‘Certainly, there is more to life than staying alive. But what I argue here is that ‘staying alive’ already always entails that more.’
Annemarie Mol - Eating in Theory, 2021
Focusing on everyday rhythms and dynamics of our relationship with food, I develop artistic interventions that are ephemeral and rhythmic, practical and poetic: catalysing acts of resistance that gesture towards re-embedding humanity within nature. It is important to me that these interventions are grounded in cultivating relations with the earth. I have a particular interest in Masanobu Fukuoka’s Natural Farming method/philosophy, JADAM, Permaculture and Biodynamic principles.
My Buddhist practice has a significant influence on my modes of working. It has guided my research towards sensuous realms as alternative modes of knowledge ‘production’. I question how ‘no-mind’ and cultivating intimacy with the more-than-human can serve as a form of resistance and healing.
Regenerative art practice
My interest in ephemeral and cyclical rhythms with food has developed into a methodology centred on the cultivation of regenerative and ‘closed-loop’ systems, such as bokashi composting, and using them as frameworks for artistic interventions and inquiry.
Foraging, fermenting, growing, composting, cooking, and eating have been some of my modes of entry. I investigate these processes as frameworks for research: exploring theory, ‘skilling’ in regenerative practices and sensory, non-cognitive knowledge.
‘Our dominant food system...deskills and disempowers people, distancing us from the natural world and making us completely dependent on systems of mass production and distribution.’
Sandor Katz - Fermentation as Metaphor, 2020
As I move through cycles of practice, a cosmic dance is set in motion, enabling complex connections to be held, of various threads of geopolitical, environmental, cultural and systemic entanglements. I continue to experiment with ways of sharing knowledge and engagement with these pulsating cycles.
My interest in ephemeral and cyclical rhythms with food has developed into a methodology centred on the cultivation of regenerative and ‘closed-loop’ systems, such as bokashi composting, and using them as frameworks for artistic interventions and inquiry.
Foraging, fermenting, growing, composting, cooking, and eating have been some of my modes of entry. I investigate these processes as frameworks for research: exploring theory, ‘skilling’ in regenerative practices and sensory, non-cognitive knowledge.
‘Our dominant food system...deskills and disempowers people, distancing us from the natural world and making us completely dependent on systems of mass production and distribution.’
Sandor Katz - Fermentation as Metaphor, 2020
As I move through cycles of practice, a cosmic dance is set in motion, enabling complex connections to be held, of various threads of geopolitical, environmental, cultural and systemic entanglements. I continue to experiment with ways of sharing knowledge and engagement with these pulsating cycles.