What’s the crossover between land work and utopia? I feel there is one, although it’s hard to articulate. Isn’t utopia science fiction, set in not-real places with fictional technology? How can that relate to working the land?
Well, increasingly utopian fiction is earthbound, with characters whose physical connection with the earth go beyond our own. Think the orogenes in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy who manipulate seismic energy, and Vern in Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland whose fungal “passenger” enables her to communicate through mycelial networks.
Then there is movement the other way, too. I recently visited the We Feed The UK exhibition across the Royal Photographic Society and Martin Parr Foundation galleries at Paintworks in Bristol. This project brought photographers and poets to farms across the UK who are growing agroecologically, eschewing intensive farming methods. Viewing the exhibition, it was clear to me the photographers and poets had seen hope in these places and were conveying this through their work.
What follows is my review of the exhibition, with a focus on the latent utopianism within its celebration of the “custodians of soil and sea”.
Ever-replenishing abundance
The first work I encounter is Sophie Gerrard’s photographs of Grampian Graziers farm, which are displayed in the corridor on the way to the Royal Photographic Society gallery space. The multi-layered images of meadow vegetation, with multiple exposures and in-laid images placing plant on top of plant, are immersive. They are indicative of one type of image that will recur throughout the exhibition, depicting agrarian abundance, a maximalist window onto nature thriving, pastoral pictures of plenty.
Gerrard’s photographs of Launston Farm establish a second theme, of growing spaces emblazoned with street art and encircled by skyscrapers, groups of urban growers amidst their polytunnels. Lisa Houston of Launston Farm is quoted as saying “we are creating a place where there is an abundance of food, and saying to people ‘you can eat it’”. In Iona Lee’s poetic response to the site, printed on the wall, she writes:
Let them feed you a secret:
abundance is endless
and ever-replenishing.
It’s a perpetual motion
organic machine.
The idea emerging here is that there is something utopian about fresh food materialising from the land when usually food is had from shops in exchange for money. What’s more, the cyclical nature of growing gives hope for the future, unlike the linear trajectory of modern life.
Re-appreciating the soil
On entering the gallery, straight ahead there is a clay bowl full of soil atop a plinth. There are no signs saying not to touch, so I touch. It’s cool on a June day that’s broaching 30°C outside, cooler even than the air-conditioned air in the gallery. They must be keeping it moist.
Johanna Churchill’s photos of West Wharmley Farm, home of Soil Farmer of the Year 2023 Stuart Johnson, fall into the pastoral category, with wholesome images of young blond boys climbing onto the tractor with their farmer dad in sunny fields. But when she turns her attention to the soil, the magic happens.
In the notes accompanying the pictures, Churchill recalls a conversation with poet Kate Fox, when “we started thinking about the stars, and how positivity is often represented by the act of ‘looking up’. On the farm I’d had to shift my focus, and I told her [Kate] I thought the constellations were at our feet this whole time.” Churchill’s second set of photos are studies of things that live close to the soil like clover and earthworms, isolated against dark backgrounds as if floating in space.
The thought this contributes towards the exhibition’s utopian undercurrent is, what if we set aside the visions we have inherited of space age futures and instead imagine utopian futures here on earth?
Demonstrating possibilities
Aaron Schuman’s documentation of Fordhall Organic Farm, which is community owned by 8,000 “landlords”, takes the form of a loose-leafed photo book. One copy has been deconstructed and stuck to the wall, all the pages and the folder that would contain them.
It is page after page of evidence for what can be done. The number of images on display again conveys a sense of plenty. Capturing so many small moments builds a sense of place while the scale remains at the level of the individual plant, animal, human experience.
Of the successful campaign to bring the farm into community ownership, making it the first community-owned farm in England and saving it from the hands of big agribusiness, the poet Jasmine Gardosi is quoted as saying “we need stories like this to know that things are possible”.
This is another utopian idea implicit within the exhibition, that these farms demonstrate the possibility of living by different models, and not just living but thriving.
Ancestral knowledge
The next thing hanging on the wall is a huge clump of flax looking like a lion’s mane. It, like the soil, invites touch. It is dry, bleached out hair, but still soft. This is the material used to make linen.
At Mallon Farm they say: “We are part of a wider community of spinners, weavers, dyers, processors, and farmers who remember how to farm flax.” Yvette Monahan’s portraits show farmer Helen with her hands opened down in a gesture towards the field she stands in, smiling widely. Farmer Charlie has a beard to match the flax.
Down in London, Falcon Fields is of the street art, skyscrapers and polytunnels variety of growing spaces, this time with West African prints in the visual mix. Here a community of Black women are growing food from their ancestral lands. Arpita Shah’s portrait of Pamela Shor shows her barefoot amongst rows of plants inside a large greenhouse, wearing a Black Rootz T-shirt.
Sandra Salazar D’eca, founder of the Go Grow With Love growing project on the site, is quoted as saying “We should all be growing together. We should all be tapping into our ancestry. We should all be looking back in order to look forward. We should all be planting seeds of intention, seeds of hope, for the next generation to come.” Like on Mallon Farm, remembering how to farm provides both a connection with ancestors and the hope of a culture surviving on into the future.
Some of the women at Falcon Fields call themselves Soil SiStars. The notes explain: “As Soil SiStars, we are all made of the same elements: from the soil and the stars.” The name hints at our utopian science fictional destinies on earth.
Hands on nature
On the Penpont Estate, Andy Pilsbury photographs young people stewarding the land. Pilsbury’s images, shown large on the wall, are also collected in a book kept in a custom-made box with accompanying materials – feathers, small bones, stones, seed heads, a butterfly specimen. It is an artefact that requires interaction, drawers to be opened, objects to be handled. Although this isn’t possible in the gallery where it appears in a Perspex box, in other settings it has been made fully available to viewers.
Even though I can’t touch these items they evoke the feeling of being on the land and are a reminder that, despite the gallery setting, nature is something to connect with physically, not only to consume through looking and thinking.
In another instance of an artist statement expressing utopian hope, Pilsbury says, “Every time I came away from Penpont, having observed the restorative harmony that was unfolding, I felt hopeful about my daughter’s future.”
Working the land
The last two farms featured are Gothelney Farm, photographed by Lúa Ribeira, and Strickley Farm, photographed by Johannes Pretorius. At first glance the subject is again the fecundity of nature, like in the rural idylls of Grampian Graziers and West Wharmley Farm. But more than the others these are depicted as working environments, making the images more georgic than pastoral.
Ribeira’s photos are the closest to minimalist of any in the exhibition. Individual images focus on wheat ears against a blue sky, a sack of flour, bubbles on bread dough. We see the stone-floored, bare walled, unfitted kitchen where water is measured in a plastic tub over a practical stainless-steel sink to make the dough. A row of finished loaves sits, out of focus, before a stone wall, implying these are building blocks: wheat, water, bread.
Pretorius’s images include barbed wire, wellies, wooden window frames, a metal detector, a diesel can, a lad wearing a school tie in front of a cow with a blanket over its back. A hedgerow along a poured concrete track. Field boundaries – fences, dry stone walls. A tractor mowing. Habitat hedges. Humans are present and at work within the environment, but the space is shared.
The poet Testament says of Strickley Farm: “You get doom and gloom about the world, but this is empowering because it has shown me how everyone can contribute to making things better.”
Poetry videos
The RPS exhibition concludes with video recordings of the poems written as part of the project. You can recreate this part of the exhibition at home by watching the videos here: https://hotpoets.org/we-feed-the-uk/.
Fresh air
Time for some fresh air… Outside, Ayesha Jones’ photographs of Winterley Lane Allotments have been installed in raised beds around the edge of a patch of grass. My grower’s eyes enjoy identifying the plants among them:
- Chives
- Marigolds
- Parsley
- Chard
- Corn
- Tomatoes
- Peas
- Cabbage
- Courgette
- Lettuce
The peas are ready for picking, and again there are no signs saying not to, so I take a pod and munch while browsing the images.
Jones’ photographs show a growing space joyously filled with people who are not farmers, including children and people with disabilities. Many images focus on their hands amongst the soil, holding tools, seeds, produce.
Time and tech
I re-enter the air-conditioned space of a gallery, this time the Martin Parr Foundation, to encounter one last set of food producers, fishing off the coast of Cornwall.
Although these are all recent photographs I’m confronted by a mix of eras. The modern day looks kitsch, the Mousehole harbour Christmas lights, a pub with gold tinsel around the bar, on the wall a picture of a man in a sheepskin jacket and a sign with a double entendre around a fishing rod. Elsewhere Jon Tonks presents pictures of knotted rope, stargazy pie, a wizened face under a woolly hat – all heritage. Then there’s a portrait of Roger, wearing a Breton top and round glasses like an early twentieth-century French artist, holding up a lobster (a surrealist?) but also sporting a baseball cap and waders.
Handmade withy pots (woven lobster pots) coexist with modern boats and cranes. On the floor of a fibreglass boat there are mackerel, a hose and blood around the fisherman’s feet. There is a direct engagement with the elements, fish, gulls, unlike new technology (clouds, servers, AI) where the relationship with the environment is hidden.
What technology is of use to us, what jobs are of use to us, what do we want our relationship with the environment to be? To be leaving with questions like these is, I think, a vindication that land work (and sea work) and utopia are aligned, in ways I might one day be better able to describe.
If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in my previous article ‘Literature and Activism: Octavia Butler, Farming and Community.’
