An offshoot of my practice?

 

The Future Present | Work in in progress | 2025

There's a branch of my work that doesn't quite fit with all the rest: my interest in growing food and nurturing the surrounding ecosystem. I think of it as my leisure interest rather than my professional practice but, because art always comes out of life, it finds its way in.

Most recently, it appeared when Nick Davies of Loophole Projects asked me to contribute a message to the future for his book The Future Present. I saw the dark side and worried there might not be humans around in the future with the means to interpret printed words or images, so asked if I could include actual seeds.

I selected seeds for their interesting shapes and ability to lie flat between pages: dark little grains of basil, beige flecks of tomato, ornate arcs of hollyhock, cornflowers with their bristles, and the elaborate black and white quills of French marigolds. Using tweezers I placed around 30 assorted seeds in each of 200 glassine packets. Urged by Nick to also make an internationally postable version (without seeds), I added the grid reference of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a marker for where to fix the packets on the page.

Nick summarises the work beautifully in his conclusion to the book: “Hoad's painstakingly packed envelopes not only hold biological messages to the future through the DNA held in the seeds, they also touch on metaphorical subjects such as the flow of life around us (whether ideas or literal seeds) and the meaning of a message to the future (is not every piece of writing but a seed?)”

It builds on a similar work I made called Mutter Erde for The Library of Lost Books back in 2012. Other plant-influenced projects include Interloper in 2014 about the grafting of fruit trees, Foreign Soil in 2015 about the challenges of being a locavore (amongst other things) and most recently RANGE (work in progress 2025- ) focusing on my small allotment, which is perched on the edge of a golf driving range that occupies a former council landfill site. Through my allotment I am also growing for the Exeter Broad Bean Flock, an attempt to create a locally adapted food crop through free pollination, and taking part in Dig for Dirt a citizen science project looking at how soil bacteria interact with toxic waste.