This post-residency reflection comes at the end of a residency-turned-occupancy as I begin to pack my studio back into bags and boxes once more. A lot of movement has happened since, globally (some in my home of the US), and personally. Studio time at the beginning of lockdown was a haven that offered a structured place and time to recalibrate from a period of academic research to consider what of my food practice needed adjusting to a new pandemic normal. The CAMP residency at Leadworks has been less about play, more about recovery and assembling meaning anew in a time where everything became red hot with precarity, some of which I was experiencing first-hand.

 

I was able to make good on some of the proposed projects, lost grip on others, and welcomed a couple of interesting projects which hitched a ride. The foraging walk led by Tess Wilmot taught me not just about permaculture and botany, but more about the need of collectivity and collective action to keep knowledge flowing, for ideas and embodied-knowing to keep mattering. This was woven with storytelling inherent in Tess’ tending-doing and showing, of plants growing in cracks, or of plants that were tended to immaculately in gardens that we walked past. This walk as a final event introduced the open-method and embodied-pedagogy as a characteristic of my social practice with food and society, and the idea of chalking to iterate and celebrate the names of ‘weeds’ had been inspired by a video of a french botanist in Toulouse chalking the names of feral plants encountered on his walk to work. This practice of plant identification chalking is most robustly practiced in Plymouth parks and wildflower areas by Rebel Botanists (who I’ve joined on a few chalkings subsequently).

 

Part of my recalibration during the CAMP residency (still in progress) concerned thinking through the nature of the art persona. From a practice of artistic directing in theatre, to a social arts practice around food that is still emergent (after an intense period of academic training, some of which I’ve needed to unlearn), I am still very much meeting myself after a sea-change. This is still landing on shaky ground as others (outside looking in) might demand that I cite lineages and theories in recent creative pursuits: a reading/doing group gathered around care-as-commons, and a jam- and pickle-making squadron that investigates circular and solidarity economies and collective food-making. These projects, nurtured through endless emails, follow-up calls and planning meetings taken in the studio, were clearly not that much different from what other community organizations might do, so what turns these actions into art, and might this labelling (eventually) require an earnest resistance or boldly playing between the boundaries?