A Year Of The Artist residency at Stroud Valleys Artspace in collaboration with the people of Stroud.
Kitchen, fruit, sugar, jars, photos, texts, video & web site

We carry the genes of the hunter-gatherer within us still. But today our relationship to the land is rarely an intimate one. We live in an age of environmental dread, where pollution and a rapacious appetite for profit threaten to unbalance ecosystems and destroy bio-diversity. And yet where progress and capital stumbles blindly on, nature, without recourse to ethics or aesthetics, grows, bears fruit, adapts and survives. In this corner of England, the fruit of the land abounds for those who seek it. From Blackness to Hope Mill the wild and free-ranging bramble and elder re-colonise both unused agricultural and post-industrial land. The remnants of once cultivated orchards of apple and plum continue to set fruit between the business park and the railway embankment. Even the supermarket car parks and municipal verges are now planted with rowan and crab apple – planning for future global economic break down, perhaps.

Credits

project management: Jo Leahy, Neil Walker, Dominic Thomas
publicity: Lizzie Walton
design: Dominic Thomas
technical: Dave Cockcroft & Jessica Bale of Cynatech
video: Jack Freedman
construction: Roger Pitcher, Rebecca MacPherson
plumbing: Neil Walker
tailoring: Pauline Thomas
assistants: Lorraine Robbins, Alison Cockcroft, Shelly Campbell

Funded by South West Arts and Stroud District Council
Sugar supplied by Waitrose and J.Sainsbury’s Stroud
Equipment supplied by Mills Kitchen Shop, Whithy’s Yard, High street, Stroud