Successful AER resident, Sara Grisewood, share successful letter of motivation for the Groundwork Gallery residency, Norwich

My practice-led research as a PhD candidate at Chelsea, uses the narrow corridors of land running by railway lines in the UK as a central reference. It will ask if an art practice, inspired by the radical aims of the Artist Placement Group (an artists group founded in 1966) can probe policies around public transport, land use and ongoing extraction industries. I am creating open-ended ‘placements’ which include working with a quarry (Hansen Aggregates) in Somerset, and with Network Rail.

I am exploring rail freight lines used by quarries, curious about the entangledness evident in these anthropogenic landscapes, where infrastructures like railways intersect with industrial sites. This creates remnants of land, islands of precious biodiversity, which also hide/tell narratives of industrial histories and botanical histories.

My practice is based on methods such as walking, chance encounters, and making journeys on trains. I make drawings, sculptures, paper, dyes, inks, and use other various craft techniques using found, foraged or recycled materials; things which are portable, light, non-interventional and thrifty. Outcomes include folded, booklets and baskets. I create portable studios: using recycled tetrapaks and handmade sketchbooks; and  work with volunteer groups, currently learning how to identify wildflowers growing on marginal lands. I hope to create networks of co-production and sociability, interweaving ways to share/record/make containers for the conversations, walks and events which are part of my practice.

How the aggregate industry moves materials around, servicing continued urbanisation and building, has become a primary strand of my research. This is focused on histories of quarrying, and the use of rail freight, around Newhaven in East Sussex, near my home, and Frome in Somerset, where I have family connections, and across Southern England.

Rail transport is the most environmentally suitable way to move goods around. I don’t drive and am passionate about affordable, public transport networks. My practice includes dreaming of speculative future transport hubs: flourishing as centres for local food production, say, transporting only what is necessary, serving the local. Utilising existing networks, not building new; in place of freight cars loaded high with extracted rocks and stones, I see them laden with abundant plant growth, a portable edible forest.

It would be beneficial and rewarding to have this residency opportunity at GroundWorks at this stage of my research; to benefit from mentorship, and to practice effective ways of engaging with and communicating these urgent issues, with a belief that art has a role here.

Research and execution plan

The residency would be an opportunity to study freight lines serving quarries around Kings Lynn and in other parts of Norfolk. This would make connections to my research into the aggregate industry in other parts of Southern England and how the growth of extraction industries and railways are inextricably linked to the rise of capitalism and environmental destruction of the Anthropocene. These are the bigger issues which would inform a varied practice of walking and drawing, collecting materials, workshops, combined with historical research and local walks to identify plants growing beside a railway line, chance encounters and recorded conversations.