Soil-brain, Gut-brain

Sculpture and audio, 2023

Soil-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 Ecology

Movement 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, 2020-22

Kinnomic 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.

Making Kin With Soil

Research and development project, 2023-4

Making 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 between Cornwall and London.

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 Iman's 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 was to create common and shared languages for revitalising soil and communicating the sentience and liveliness of their inhabitants.

Iman is now working on a new film commission, building on her findings from the residency.

Seed & Tuber

Genetic Codes of Agency and Inertness, Film, 2022

The potato is a multi-world.
Travelling through the rips and
tears of geographic expansion.
Pulled through new lands, 
to new lands.
A settler and immigrant of 5 parts, 
4 lost.

A dialogue between a potato seed and a potato tuber, exploring their genetic trajectories as they respond to themes such as migration, belonging, and rootedness.