Movement is Natural
Solo show at Grays Wharf Gallery, 2024In April and August 2023, I undertook an artist residency at the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) and the Eden Project. The residency, titled Making Kin with Soil, provided me with a period for research supported by conversations with scientists, growers, ecologists and researchers from University of Exeter and Eden Project. Almost a year on, Movement is Natural, brings together research materials, watercolour maps and poems realised during the residency, with works created in the period since.
Central to the exhibition is a moving image work, which shares its title with the show. This explores human and nonhuman agency in the soils of Cornwall’s tin and clay mining tips and pits, reenvisaging these depleted ecosystems as spaces for healing, resistance and encounter. Interwoven with the spoken narrative of the video is an audio piece made in collaboration with sound designer Tom Fisher. Together we recorded sounds of ingestion, digestion and respiration including: the ruminations of a goat, the reverberations and oscillations within plant stems and soils, and the sounds of licking and breathing.
Prominent in the space is the large ceramic sculpture and sound work, Soil-brain, Gut-brain. A piece originally commissioned by Radical Ecology for the Against Apartheid exhibition at KARST Gallery, 2023. Soil-brain, the sound, is a reflection on the meanings of fertility, vitality, and productivity for soils. Whilst, Gut-brain, a clay vessel, is one of several works in the gallery that uses the digestive system of an earthworm as a means to contemplate the absorption, filtration, and digestion of soils as part of a perpetual natural process.
Transcripts of conversations with collaborators provide insights into the intersection of art and science, exploring the ways in which ideas are translated and sometimes mistranslated across disciplines. I hope that exhibiting these materials may encourage further dialogue and collaboration between those engaging with South West soils, emphasising agency beyond extraction and challenging the divide between natural and human-made.
Overall Movement is Natural is an exploration of the dynamics of soil movement and behaviour through a more-than-human lens. Critically engaging with prevailing narratives on soil management in colonial, productionist and geopower contexts, the exhibition advocates for embodied, relational practices and imagines narratives beyond those of extraction.
A project supported by Arts and Culture and the Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI), University of Exeter, Cornwall. With special thanks to Radical Ecology and Field Notes.
Text adapted from exhibition text by Field Notes
Soil-brain, Gut-brain
Sculpture and audio, 2023Soil-brain and Gut-brain are new works comprising a sound piece (8 min 15 secs) and a ceramic sculpture. They form part of a wider research project titled Making Kin with Soil, presented in collaboration with the Eden Project, University of Exeter’s Environmental and Sustainability Institute, and Radical Ecology.
Both artworks intend to disrupt notions that soil should remain in place, envisioning soil as a body that both moves and behaves. While we often reflect on the importance of soils to us, these pieces prompt us to contemplate what other bodies mean to soils.
Soil-brain, the audio-piece, takes the form of a meditative journey. Listeners are invited to take on the perspective of a thinking, acting, and feeling soil body, and reflect on what fertility, productivity, and vitality mean to soils. The piece concludes with an invitation to inhabit soil’s skin, and experience an earthworm entering their surface layer, adjusting their weight, thickness, and porosity.
Gut-brain, is a tall vessel shaped out of clay. The vessel recalls the digestive system of an earthworm - tracing its form from the mouth, pharynx and oesophagus, all the way down to the crop, gizzard, and intestine. These stacked vessels symbolise the journey of soils and nutrients as they pass through an earthworm’s body - where they are mined, recycled, tamed, cleared, and renewed.
Together, these two artworks raise questions about the relationships between soils and earthworms. Is the soil eating and absorbing the earthworm, or the earthworm consuming the soil? The intent, to explore non-human entanglements through the lens of of eating, digesting, and nourishment.
A Map of Southcombe Gardens
Gouache on Cotton Rag with accompanying audio (10 mins), 2024. Commissioned and curated by Southcombe Barn & Radical EcologyMovement is Natural: A Map of Southcombe Gardens (2024) invites viewers on a journey through movement, imagination and reorientation. The work serves not only as a portal into the exhibition’s themes of migration, invasion and belonging, but also as an immersive exploration of Southcombe Gardens.
The map encourages viewers to observe and reorient themselves around five key “invasive” plants growing at Southcombe - the eucalyptus, silver birch, fern, gunnera and rhododendron. An accompanying sound piece, also created by Iman, invites visitors to engage with the landscape through their intuitions, feelings, and tacit knowledge. This enables deeper reflections on the historical and political significance of mapping, categorising and ordering, and its implications for the intimate relationship between land and bodies.
Moving beyond binary categorisations of “native” and “invasive”, how might we consider the vitality and agency of the landscape, to explore the multiple histories and interactions that define a species, regardless of origin?
Kinnomic Botany
Freeing the Potato from its Scientific and Colonial ties, Film, 2020-22Kinnomic Botany sets out a vision of a parallel botanical world through the ‘eyes’ of a potato. Entered through a clay pot, the landscape makes visual a system of mapping that encompasses what has long been lost from the potato’s history, while offering new pathways to connect with the plant world through personal and tacit experience.
As a species that crossed the Atlantic from Peru, the potato is subject to a typical hero story - the unexpected reward reaped by conquistadors on their exhibitions to Peru in search of gold. Instead, they returned with the potato. The result, a spread of potatoes emerging from a narrow genetic bottleneck and a nomenclature to represent a new order over territories, borders, and non-human bodies.
But now
It is time to re(remember)
I am more than my tuber.
I am my seed,
my flower,
my fruits,
my roots.
It is time to re(remember)
I am more than my tuber.
I am my seed,
my flower,
my fruits,
my roots.
Making Kin With Soil
Research and development project, 2023-4Making Kin With Soil is a residency and research project exploring soil movement and nourishment through a more-than-human lens. The project is supported through a collaboration with the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) and the Eden Project in Cornwall. Iman spent time with researchers at both sites, constructing a soil network within and beyond the South-West.
The project included a work-in-progress exhibition held on April 24 at the University of Exeter’s Environment & Sustainability Institute. This exhibition invited scientists to navigate a polyphony of voices and perspectives on soils, bridging the cultural and scientific realms and challenging the dichotomy between the natural and unnatural. The showcased work included a variety of multimedia outputs from the exploratory period, such as audio compositions, watercolor paintings, sculptures, and immersive experiences.
Workshops at both sites incorporated meditative journeying exercises to explore how intimacy, emotion, and imagination can contribute to scientific inquiry. These workshops aimed to develop strategies that bridge different knowledge domains, connecting the local to the global and the creative to the empirical. The goal, to create common and shared languages for revitalising soil and communicating the sentience and liveliness of their inhabitants.