Residencies:
Robert Rush was born in Guildford in 1978. He lives and works in South London where he facilitates involvement with therapeutic green spaces and activities for refugees and asylum seekers.
‘I am concerned with the alienation of groups and individuals through the systematic processes of state and capital, and the shredding apart of our material world in a perpetual act of division for the purposes of wealth and hegemony, often under the auspices of progress.
Much of my practice has revolved around designing and building utilitarian objects that serve some form of communal function and become the springboard for further activity. This has taken the form of kilns, installations, ovens, greenhouses and gardens.’
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Bronwen Buckeridge
July
Bronwen Buckeridge works with field recordings, dialogue and text, paying attention to the non-human, and to the codes and rituals that shape rural practices and small communities.
She steps into the role of witness, translator and producer, gently remixing what she finds into performative events, installation and artist books. Recent work includes a live pigeon race, audio conversations with dogs and an earthwork made with the assistance of witches.
Bronwen has shown her work extensively with exhibitions at Matt’s Gallery (2022, 2020, 2018, 2014), Turner Contemporary (2018), John Hansard Gallery (2014) and Studio Voltaire (2014).
Presentations of practice in festival and non-traditional contexts include The Whitstable Biennale (2014, 2012), Estuary Festival (2016) and ArtHouses (2019)
. Bronwen has a studio at CAST in Helston and is a lecturer in Fine Art at Falmouth University.
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Sean Roy Parker, AKA Fermental Health.
August
Sean Roy Parker is a writer, cook, gardener and visual artist based at The Field co-living project in Shipley, Derbyshire (UK). He practises slow and low-tech digestion using leftover consumer debris and natural abundances in anticipation of the post-capitalist transition, and redistributes resources through flexible care structures like labour exchange, favours and artswaps. In his ongoing project Fermental Health, he writes essays about and leads workshops on the lifecycle of materials, complexities of interspecies responsibility, and problem-solving through collaborative action.
His writing has been published in WeedsFeed by Sandra Kosorotova for Publics, Helsinki (Finland), Seeking Channels by Well Projects, Margate (UK), and Worry, Collect, Fold (translated by Max Weinland) for Kunstverein Luneburg (Germany). Roy has delivered public research projects on fermenting with microbes for Liverpool Biennial (UK), anarchist solidarity with peasant farmers at Pols (Spain), and is preparing for his upcoming solo show The Beans at Two Queens, Leicester (UK). He is also a @wysing.arts.centre Resident for 2023-24.
Roy will be on site in the first half of August and will be writing a text about interspecies intimacy on sites of food growing to be published by The Common Table, and running a workshop for local schoolchildren on inventing slogans to cheer on our invertebrate friends while they build soil.
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Xiyao Chen
August - September
Xiyao is an interdisciplinary artist, landworker and researcher. Xiyao’s practice is driven in response to the imminent climate emergencies, across the expanded field of anthropology, moving images, sonic sculptures and agroecology. They are currently nurturing an embodied practice that values care over extraction, challenging eco-social injustices by focusing on more-than-human interspecies kinship and the affective turn in ecology.
They would like to use the opportunity of the Allotment Club residency to continue developing an on-going project, ‘Earthly Eternal’, in relation to non-extractive energy and the situated soil, which traces and embodies the element earth as an evolving and transforming entity circling the cycles of
life.
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