Introduction - Visual Compost
My art practice, centred around acts of paying embodied attention to my personal domestic food garden (ie gardening), is situated within an eco-feminist world view that seeks to nurture ways of art-making alongside and in partnership with the natural world, in cognition of my non-hierarchical human beingness within an entangled and systemic web of life.
In the selection of artworks and inspirations referenced below, I track a possible path through the conceptual, ideological and material influences which bring diversity to the thematic compost which is now informing my own art practice. From Jean Dubuffet’s iconic Texturologies , which illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of synaesthetic perception and highlight the power of our attention to the “innermost textures… which…constitute the force that inhabits the core of things” (and I find this force in Tacita Dean’s work too) through the pioneering early photographic works of gardener Charles Jones, who championed the commonplace vegetables and flowers he cultivated with an originative attention to light and framing (to reference Anna Tsing’s ‘Arts of noticing’) all the way to recent Sydney National Art School graduate Samantha Jade, who employs cameraless techniques to literally and figurately hot compost film negatives with striking results.
Artists working in this space tend to methods that are inquisitive and collaborative, and they are willing to enter into artistic partnerships whose outcomes are by their very nature unpredictable and which are as fascinating as they are seemingly capricious. In a field increasingly referred to as the ‘Bioarts’, these artists are cognisant of the infinite animacies of life on earth and seek to give voice to experiences of life both human and more-than-human, with methodologies that are embedded in, and inseparable from, material and practice. The elements of time and biological process are actively invited to participate in a highly embodied experience of art-making, which reveals itself in continuous making and unmaking. This invites me to challenge traditional notions of creation and completion, release value judgements, and surrender to process (another appealing feature of Dean’s work).
Many of the contemporary artists I have referenced work in varying alternative photographic modalities, but have in common their interest in exploring new ways of working intuitively with their non-human surroundings, minimising their use of extractive and destructive technologies and materials, and acknowledging the complexities, and embracing the real challenges, of living in Alexis Shotwell’s ‘Compromised Times’.
Finally, I found it difficult in my wanderings about the world wide web to compartmentalise certain types of making within or without the boundaries of what we might decide to denote as ‘Art’, so I have included some references that might sit at the edges of the categorisation: an introductory interview with Helena Norberg-Hodge which contextualises the act of thinking and making locally in light of the great risks (not to mention lie) of globalisation, the creation of a community garden on historically compromised land, a group exhibition centred around soil, and an online academic thinktank exercise which investigates composting as a methodology, which perfectly sums up this collection of works that has informed my own investigations this semester.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dubuffet, J 1995, Prospectus et Tous Ecrits Suivants, H Damisch (ed.), Gallimard, Paris.
Duffy, J 2021, Perceiving Dubuffet, Liverpool University Press.
Kafka, G 2024, ‘Noticing is my way of opposing’ - Future Observatory Journal, Future Observatory Journal, viewed 21 March 2025, <https://fojournal.org/interview/anna-tsing-noticing-is-my-way-of-opposing/>.
Merleau-Ponty, M 1945, Phenomenology of Perception, Forgotten Books, London.
Shotwell, A 2016, Against Purity : Living Ethically in Compromised Times, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Mn.
Death in the Garden
Even though this is the most recent post on this blog, this short audio-video production provides a useful introduction for my perspective on what it is to live in this garden of life on Earth, reminding me of the deep time story of how we got here, the importance of human storytelling, and the fallacy of the nature/culture divide.
This next (and much longer) interview on the Death in the Garden podcast, with activist Helena Norberg-Hodge, looks at the vital role of localisation as a fundamental systemic approach to our most pressing existential problems.
“We have this overabundant natural resource, which is human beings. We can show that when people go back to the land, After the stupid machines, they are now needed to nurture the individual plant, to pick the fruit that's ripe, not come along with the machine and pick every fruit and then often burn or throw away half of it.
We couldn't have anything more inefficient than this techno-economic system that just rips out of nature, that creates … trawling nets that could contain 17 jumbo jets, instead of allowing fishermen to pick and choose what fish they're going to actually be catching instead of the nets that just drops everything off the ocean floor and then throws away half of it. We have them escalating in efficiency and extraction like we've never seen before. This is why we're facing collapse. We must do what we can to liberate human beings. We (‘ve) become too expensive for ourselves because of an artificial economy that tells us that the mass produced, the mass harvested, is cheaper. It isn't cheaper. We're not given access to the truth.
We're enslaved in a system where the dollars are lying. Local, healthy, fresh food, natural wood, natural building materials of every kind, natural fibers are all cheaper. And we could be freed to actually have a world of far greater beauty, far greater health, if we would move away from the lies of the techno-economic so-called efficiency.
We are proving now in permaculture, in agroecology, in many localized community-based ways of doing things, that we can do things that will provide for our needs in a generous, beautiful way while healing the earth.” Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures: https://www.helenanorberghodge.com/
StadtAcker Garden, Munich, Germany
A cooperative act between city administration and citizens, the StadtAcker is a community garden project located in on the grounds of a former military facility built in the 1930s by the Nazi regime.
Considering the high cost of real estate in Munich, one of the questions posed by the space is “What benefits does such a place bring for people? Should the costly and scarce Munich land be used for gardens?”.
The StadtAcker aims at creating awareness for the environment and ecological connections. There are fields of wild flowers and a colony of bees. One can experiment with old, robust seeds and different ways to compost. School classes and nearby kindergartens have their own patches. Talks, workshops, and communal cooking evenings, one can experience nature close by.
The StadtAcker makes possible what is often not self-evident in a large city: it enables people to experience community and the connection to nature.
Although of course such projects exist in many places, the project speaks to the universality of the domestic food gardening experience, as well as its role as resistance against isolation and cultural homogenisation, and for/with, communal organisation and knowledge sharing.
https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/ecopolis-munchen-2019/stadtacker
Noora Sandgren
Noora Sandgren is a visual artist and educator from Helsinki with a varied art practice centred around the Bioarts and a long practice of working in alternative photographic mediums including cameraless photography. Bioart, a term which is new to me, is described by Noora as 'borrowing from the methods of science, making invisible and unknown visible with the means of artistic expression – it doesn’t provide solutions but prompts critical questions such as: what is life, or how can we collaborate with non-human organisms.
Her exhibition Soft (becomings) shows works created in an embodied way with compost in a family garden: https://noorasandgren.com/Soft-becomings
“Their marks tell stories of ways of being, of invisible powers. Within the complex co-dependencies of enmeshment of things, human and other-than-human, I wonder: how to live well within the cyclicality of things, embracing metamorphosis and constant movement, resisting the need to harness everything?”.
She also says “To reconsider the photographic material body as a leaky container of materials with histories, gestures and meanings, a being that does things, is a work of relating; this human body and that photographic body. I turn to local household ingredients, making slow phase photographic paper bodies with natural inks, like thurmeric, blueberry, blackberry, beetroot, adding some snow water and my saliva. This photograph is about sharing chemistry. I also found a “detox mix” – we need this, I say to myself and the photograph. It consists of nettle, spirulina, wheat, lemon grass, pea protein, lingonberry, chlorella, cranberry.
I can set up the space for a photograph to grow, but it does not grow for me, but because it is a living thing. It´s interesting to create conditions though, an environment for something to happen, for us both to be exposed, to become together with the photograph. This kind of development of an image is not about separations; we leak into each other, chemically, in embodied encounters, in which the mutuality of effects lie: my gestures, digestion of materials contructing my immune system, the way the pigments change and are sucked by the thursty (sic) porous papers. This process has no clear end, this exhibition is not an end product, but a living assemblage, a space for things continuing from another.”
I copy and paste her own words here, because to summarise them in this context would be to distort their intention with my own meanings, and they stand so beautifully on their own, and are supremely inspiring to me.
The work below, and the interview quotes below it, also features a compost co-creation, and accompanied an interview with Noora in Der Greif Specials, a virtual space dedicated to writing on photography, showcasing unique content, projects and announcements.
https://noorasandgren.com/Der-Greif-Q-I
“I can thank the home garden at Hiidenvesi for a lot of things. This space has its own time, which has attuned me to be play-able. Many years ago, I found a forgotten box of older-than-me photographic papers that used to belong to my father. The garden provided the right kind of place to learn within the mix of different materialities, including photographic matter. Those found paper-beings together with the garden became my teacher. Working with cameraless photographs positions me in a tangible relationship with the body of the photograph. How are our bodies the same? We both have light-sensing skin, record happenings and touches, change in time, and share chemistry. Thinking of the analogies between myself and the photographic body has led me to consider what the new materialist theorist Jane Bennett calls “thing power”: how all matter can have an effect on others, but always within a situated assemblage of many. Photography as a thing-being, what does it do, how is it constructed? Considering a cameraless photograph as a being allows me to practice empathy towards other-than-human entities, not only seeing but sensing them as bodies, related by material flows. Working with this kind of photographic relationship is about researching and meditating on what it means to take part in a relationship and how it is always born new. I consider a photograph to be my companion, which is not always easy. Yet, there is no way of getting rid of it; it inhabits me. Then, what is left is to sit with it and consider this a practice without conclusions or frozen answers. This is an open process of living together. And with whom do I really share my life with? How much or little am I able to perceive those? Who and what processes are meaningful life sustainers?”
Finally, I include photographs of an exhibition ‘Peels, Seetalk and Bluings install at Ore21 in
Made on a residency at the island of Oro in Finland, Noora herself describes this work as “A collage holding touches of many contributors & acts, of tasting, smelling, getting wet and stung, listening, speaking, offering and receiving, leaving behind and returning, caring and being cared fore, winning some fears by relating.”.
It is Noora’s commitment to creating in sympoiesis with her natural surroundings that especially interests me, as well as her incorporation of new and non-destructive photographic mark-making.
Magali Duzant
https://amt.parsons.edu/mfaphoto/magali-duzants-a-tree-a-garden/
This exhibition brought together two works by Magali Duzant, A Tree Grows in Queens and The Dry Garden.
Installation view of A Tree, A Garden, by Magali Duzant at Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, 2023.
https://www.magaliduzant.com/atree/a-tree-grows-in-queens, reflecting on the ways in which narratives of trees “have touched on the larger topics of climate, capitalism, catastrophe, and compassion.”
See also the video flipthrough of the publication The Dry Garden, shared below:
Karl Blossfeldt
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/karl-blossfeldt
Early documentary plant photography as typology, from the modernist movement of New Objectivity.
Samantha Jade
Samantha Jade works with film in compost, using a cameraless technique to create these sympoietic photographs ‘with’ the natural world. “Through diverse eco-alchemical photographic processes, Jade’s work argues for the cross-fertilisation between scholars, scientists, artists, communities, and non-human beings to reconfigure current separations and manage co-living on our damaged planet.”
https://pgshow23.nas.edu.au/products/samantha-jade-p-hot-compost-82-hour-exposure
Jenni Eskola
A finnish artist who works with chlorophyll on paper to collaborate with time in the making of artworks.
From the Exhibition With Time, at the Helsinki Art Museum.
https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/exhibitions/jenni-eskola-with-time/
Tacita Dean
Specifically, working in photochemical film and the methodology of surrender. "Film …is still the authentic act. When you expose light on a negative, that is still an authentic act. That’s about verissimilitude."..
Tacita Dean, from Blind Folly at the Menil Collection, Houston Texas, February 2025.
Two great interviews on her process, https://youtu.be/xSIGJUVeJ4A?si=HXH74qmjZSGZjvLt and here also: https://youtu.be/6nWykZMuBGw?si=fEeIxHieVczf6sT7
Nancy Macko
https://www.nancymackophotography.com/
Decompositions is a series of macro photographs of a cross section view of a plastic domestic kitchen compost bin, although I would not describe this as compost per se as it has very little exposure at this stage to the general microbiome present in a more natural environment. However, the materials do begin to decompose and rot, which is of visual interest.
Also see this short talk by Nancy on the concepts here: https://youtu.be/dxEXqCRKCaU?si=mS54wTgV91HuKafO
Odalisque, Nancy Macko. 2020.