Land Shapes

Land Shapes was an artist collaboration between myself and artist, Ruth Singer as part of Ruth’s Cultures of Care project – a two year Arts Council funded project with examines “under-explored stories of care, people, places, objects… in how artist activities and creative practice contributes to a culture of care”. I was delighted to be invited by Ruth to respond to the theme of care with my work on Front Gardens, alongside artist Karen Logan who also collaborated with Ruth exploring themes of nature connections, walking and landscape history. The exhibition took place during August 2024. 

My contribution focussed on developing my work about Front Gardens – exploring the impact of lost and or flourishing front gardens on the environment, personal and community wellbeing. A project that was borne out of lockdown through daily walks on one particular route in my neighbourhood, taken multiple times over two years. 

In that time, I have seen significant changes to vibrant, flourishing front gardens become grey, concrete graveyards of what was. I saw a glorious magnolia tree that brightened my days for many years only to come down in a blink of an eye. More and more cars on slabbed front gardens have become the new mechanical wildlife. Yet, I have also seen one front garden become a flower and vegetable plot with raised beds, weeds being left to thrive, more manageable plant pots proudly on display. However, my neighbourhood was, and still continues, to change drastically with a fast turnaround of convenience over nature – the essence of “mutualism” between human and plant connection losing its way to a more insular community enveloped behind the safety of an ever-evolving urban jungle. 

Through collaborative research, Ruth and I exchanged thoughts, conversations, and encountered our own pathways to creating something meaningful from our shared and solo experiences of observational walks, contributing to shifts in thinking and creative processes. By having an open brief, the flow of slow thinking, slow working, slow creating, lent itself to witnessing the slow seasonal and non-seasonal changes to front gardens over the course of nearly a year – in contrast to the quick human-inflicted impact on front gardens has, both directly and immediately, on the environment, personal and community wellbeing. 

By working collaboratively, we created our own responses to our explorations and gently found our way to the outcome of sharing our artwork as a small exhibition in Ruth’s Leicestershire garden studio, including Karen’s Walking Skirt project.

Artworks

The artworks I produced are my emotional response to disappearing front gardens told through combined layers of printmaking, textiles, translucent papers, and colour:

“The Invisible Front Garden” – my printed paper and textiles piece about lost gardens that have been replaced with paving  slabs. The blind emboss represents the colours of lost gardens and wildlife that lie below the paving. The weave indicates how modern life has taken precedence over the natural environment, yet bringing attention to the fact that one can still flourish alongside the other as a front garden. 

“Lost Front Gardens” – my print and textile multi-layered piece which highlights the significant impact the loss of a front garden has on environmental and human wellbeing through the use of negative space, blind emboss and a limited colour palette. 

“The Disappearing Environment” – This multi-layered piece is an emotional response to observing a local front garden disappear over a period of time and how that sense of outer physical loss impacts on our inner landscape. The front garden become less vibrant, gradually disappearing as the underlying layers are revealed, and eventually gives way to paving slabs.

“Urban Front Gardens” – a visual data collection book which records the number of flourishing and lost front gardens in my local neighbourhood in Leicester. The green colour blocks represent the number of flourishing gardens, wild “weed”-filled gardens, to red paved or grey concreted lost front gardens on my regular walking route from my doorstep.

“Diminishing” – this piece uses a limited colour palette, blind emboss printing from my linocuts, and cut-out negative shapes to draw attention to aspects of diminishing front gardens.

Front Gardens is an ongoing theme to my overarching long term project of Plants & Place. As I continue working on developing this work, I’m looking into re-wilding my own front garden, and thinking about how I can work with my local neighbourhood to return to community, a sense of place – connecting through the idea of mutualism with our environment and human to human.