This is Where it Begins
19/01/07 23:55
I'm sitting on a bus at London Victoria waiting for
it to leave. My parents are on the pavement waving.
My friends carry on drinking, back at the party in
the bar where I left them.
This is where it begins: in the first month of 2007, in my first year out of art school; I am leaving London on an overnight bus towards the far north west of Scotland.
Then, from the the top of this island, over the course of the year, I travel South, making my way by increments, to the south west tip of Cornwall, which I aim to reach at the end of the summer. Each point, at the corners of the zig-zag line of my journey, is one of fourteen farms, land-based businesses and lives. I live and work on family farms, organic and conventional; a croft; in an eco-community; on country estates; in a stilton dairy; and at a multi-million pound salad and vegetable production business. There are detours: to abattoirs and cattle markets; art schools, exhibitions and parties; in a wandering, wondering exploration of place.
Why farming?
A farm, as a particular place on the earth, in which th earth becomes the site of one of the most profound relationships of human life: between people and their environment, in its widest sense. Farming, as it enacts and becomes a metaphor for how we live on the land, as cultivation of the land is our most basic from of culture.
In my first steps into 'the real world' after the bubble of the Ruskin and Oxford University, farming is a fitting metaphor and process by which to creatively piece together myself in life and work after art school. GB Farming is a joining up of the dots.
This is where it begins: in the first month of 2007, in my first year out of art school; I am leaving London on an overnight bus towards the far north west of Scotland.
Then, from the the top of this island, over the course of the year, I travel South, making my way by increments, to the south west tip of Cornwall, which I aim to reach at the end of the summer. Each point, at the corners of the zig-zag line of my journey, is one of fourteen farms, land-based businesses and lives. I live and work on family farms, organic and conventional; a croft; in an eco-community; on country estates; in a stilton dairy; and at a multi-million pound salad and vegetable production business. There are detours: to abattoirs and cattle markets; art schools, exhibitions and parties; in a wandering, wondering exploration of place.
Why farming?
A farm, as a particular place on the earth, in which th earth becomes the site of one of the most profound relationships of human life: between people and their environment, in its widest sense. Farming, as it enacts and becomes a metaphor for how we live on the land, as cultivation of the land is our most basic from of culture.
In my first steps into 'the real world' after the bubble of the Ruskin and Oxford University, farming is a fitting metaphor and process by which to creatively piece together myself in life and work after art school. GB Farming is a joining up of the dots.