Successful AER applicant, Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes, shares letter of motivation for the GroundWork Gallery, Norfolk residency
- Written byPost-Grad Community
- Published date 25 April 2023
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Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes, MA Art & Science student from Central Saint Martins has been selected for the AER residency at GroundWork Gallery, an established residency programme based in Norfolk
Set up by Professor Lucy Orta UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion in 2015, The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for short residencies at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century – biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
Read Lucy's successful proposal
As a transdisciplinary artist and philosopher and recent MA Art & Science graduate, I’ve been exploring how artistic practice can become “intra-actions” (Barad, 2007), revealing the entanglements between humans and more-than-humans in the Anthropocene. To me, everything is drawing, revealing mutually co-constitutive relationships in the universe across micro and macro scales. Each mark is an exploration in moment of spacetime, each material holding embodied knowledge.
I work site-specifically with materials that transcend the boundary of living and non-living systems: from honey and reclaimed foil to microbes and algae, to pencils and paint. Through active collaborations with material agency and knowledge, I aim to move from human and non-human to more-than-human.
Last July, I participated in a 10-day “Remote Guide Extractivism” residency in Athens and Elefsina, with 10 international interdisciplinary creatives. In ancient times, this had been Demeter’s temple, a sacred site with fresh spring water; now we visited run-down cement factories, oil refineries, spent time with humans, plants and insects and the abandoned shipwreck yard of Eleusis (where the gulf is so contaminated fishing is illegal). Since returning, I’ve been eager to delve deeper into extraction in the U.K. What’s so fascinating is extraction is simultaneously local and global (connecting to ideas of quantum entanglement).
Alongside the distinction between humans and other-than-humans, there is an often-unspoken distinction between living and non-living materials. As a result of embedded power structures arising from settler-colonialism (Povellini, 2016), we have been separated from the land and extraction is a key process by which this is enacted.
Extractivism is an ongoing process of taking away, removing and displacing whilst simultaneously leaving and abandoning. It’s an inversion of reciprocity. Through this transformation, the values of materiality are changed to create an imbalance. The logic is one of using rather than honouring, power structures are entrenched so that the labour and agency of many humans and more-than-humans are made invisible. And yet each moment of extraction reveals hidden entanglements. How can we shift from extractivist processes to a different form of entanglement, informed by indigenous knowledge and land pedagogy?
Inspired by Potawatomi Bryophyte scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who argues that mosses are “a vehicle for intimacy with the landscape” (2021:x), I wrote my master’s thesis on how moss’s rhizomatic structure, thriving through entangled communal exchange, challenges the borders and boundaries forged by extraction.
Over 400 million years old, mosses have survived many apocalypses and could be our greatest teachers if only we were able to listen. This very act of waiting, listening, and learning from moss transgresses the current boundaries between humans and other-than-humans. In this vein, I co-created a series of moss workshops in collaboration with Laura Melissa Williams, exploring the rhizomatic relations of Earth and equity. I would like to develop this in close connection with the land at Groundworks.
Kimmerer states “much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience” (2021:82). This is how I work in my own practice, taking time to observe and make meaning through experience. At Groundworks, I want to learn from the mosses present across the landscape: from the fens to the coast, to heavily farmed fields, from peat bogs where moss helps sequester carbon, to mines where moss creates soil from tailings and rock.
Collaboration is a key part of my creative process, enabling us to create something greater than the sum of its parts. I’m particularly excited by the prospect of working across different disciplines, from the West Norfolk British Bryophyte Society, to the mosses, to Norfolk Geodiversity.
I would make sketchbooks, for myself and others on the residency, to gather field notes fromour explorations; seeing how mosses live, how they affect and are affected by the stone-quarries and other extractivist logics. What do these reveal about our human and more-than-human entanglements What can we learn from listening to moss?
Ultimately, I would like to use these field notes to make a publication of lessons from moss, a collaboration with the mosses, Groundworks, the Norfolk bryophyte society, the words of Kimmerer and stories from feminist Celtic mythology (to ground the knowledge in this place).
I believe the logic of moss may be one of the strongest living challenges to extraction. By investigating how moss responds to sites of extraction, I hope to gather knowledge to enable us to rethink and change our extractive processes.
I would also like to co-create sculptures from site specific waste materials, that moss can then grow on and can slowly go back to the land, creating a cyclical ephemeral collaboration. I recognise that “waste” is defined by extraction; therefore, I want to work to challenge this in my own artistic material practice.
This would be a compelling and enriching experience for the site-specific nature of my work, to work in tandem with the ecosystems of this land and learn from the diverse ecologies, land pedagogy and entanglements between Groundworks and my home, like the mosses that are both far away and yet next door. If selected, I would use this residency as a deeper grounding for my continued investigation into extraction, entanglement, and moss relationships in the U.K. This would also feed into the development of moss workshops, which I plan to continue iteratively around the country, building the mossy rhizomatic networks.
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press
Kimmerer, R, W. (2021) Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Dublin: Penguin Random House
Povellini, E. (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press
Zheng, B (2020) Art as MultiSpecies Vibrancy. Art Asia Pacific Magazine 119
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