Gathering and sowing (the seeds of a work)

RANGE | Work in progress | 2025

 

Making work about Exeter's golf driving range has been on my mind for a while. I finally began to grip the subject properly when, with some fellow artists, I began to investigate the history and geography of our locality. I realised my council allotment was on the edge of the former Corporation Brickworks (and later landfill site) and that the driving range was built on top of those brickworks. 

I then started a wonderful online course at UCL run by Bella Riza: Worlds Upon Words: Unlocking Emotion Through Film which I'm using to help me find the shape of this project.

I think it's probably about precarity - environmental precarity, of course: how we are balanced on the edge of catastrophe. But in a more day-to-day sense, about my allotment, one of just 12 precariously perched above the contaminated land below. And how I use nurturing the soil, making room for wildlife, and growing my own food as a way of shoring up belief in a better future, even as more and more of my plot falls away into the brickfield (and I am showered with misfired golfballs).

In my allotment, I'm devoting some space to Exeter's broad bean flock. It's a community growing project, now in its second year, coordinated by Exeter Seed Bank. In gardens and allotments across the city, we're encouraging our different varieties of beans to cross-pollinate wildly to create a broad bean uniquely adapted to Exeter's soil and climate. It's been described as a living seed bank, complementary to static seed banks such as Svalbard Global Seed Vault. So, I suppose, another way of accessing hope and building resilience.

Which leads me on to my contribution to a forthcoming artists' book by Nick Davies The Future Present, for which I'll also be referencing seed banks as a message to the future. I've touched on them before in Mutter Erde, but more of that (and Foreign Soil) in a future post.