About Me

 This week I was thinking about collaborations. And in response to someone else's call I wrote some of the following , while thinking about performing and growing, about landscape and body and about my own background.

I called it Growing Dance 

I am now over fifty. I never thought that that would be my first point of reference for anything but these categorisations have become markers for funding in Arts practices.

This year is the tenth anniversary of the meeting in Krems of the Nyeleni Food Sovereignty Movement. There have been others since but this one introduced me to food activism on a larger scale than my local allotment or community garden and it still informs my thinking.

I have remained in gardening as an occupation. I am still a practitioner who works primarily with landscape and can't imagine now, working any other way .

I live in an area with its own community plots. I support and work in other gardens who grow their own produce and in the last couple of years have developed a way of working that involves directly coaching and mentoring others who want to get their own hands in the earth.

As a practitioner I have always worked from the basis of sharing knowledge and encouraging others to experiment, and have been often told that I am a latent teacher.

My first training after school was in social science. This was followed by a long period of time living in Copenhagen, which carries it's own story.

On returning I worked in homeless services and only started gardening in my early thirties , something that coincided with the death of my parents. I had never grown anything prior to that and thought it required some kind of special gift. Since then I have realised that the only gift you require is the ability to pay attention and be in the present .

Something that transfers to performance. If you are a performer, you know how to do that, in fact it is essential for Live work. And if you are coming from performance you already understand how to connect with others in a space and that transfers beautifully to plants.

And if you explore techniques like No Dig or Permaculture you learn to tread lightly on this earth while still coaxing the sweetness out of it.

Earth is often categorised as something almost dense and solid and associated with the grounding of emotions or with its therapeutic value but for me it is its everchanging fluid nature that is its most profound aspect. And what grows out of it is the greatest form of enchantment.

 

Industrial landscapes

 Inspired by the work of Brenda Colvin , and the images btw are taken from Trish Gibsons interesting  book on landscape architect Brenda Colvin,Trish Gibson 2011,  I began today to formulate an idea for creating post viral landscapes, going beyond concepts of re wilding , sustainability and biodiversity and instead letting strong bold planting tell it's own story and communicate it's own intelligence.

 

Initial thoughts to site research Glasnevin Industrial Estate, which is particularly placed between the Royal Canal and Tolka Linear Park and to create some kind of bridge or island that is planted between the two spaces.

This would not be a conventionally pretty planting or community garden and neither would it be a Sheffield Nigel Dunnett type of sustainable planting but it would be something more futuristic , post viral , not soft and blended but remarkable and unknowable.

This would be done in the belief that ours are not the only intelligences at work on the planet and that nothing in our world is static.

This project could be a collaboration with architecture and science and art as well as horticulture and other landscape practitioners.

And would apply a different lens to the local landscapes we have walked often daily in this past year of restricted movements.

It would also tie in ,in spirit, with the project begun many years ago in the landscapes of Athy. More on this later.

This may just be a way to initiate new conversations or it may become a series of online posts on instagram and other places or it may get other legs entirely.

Carmel