Opening event: September 15th, 6-9 pm
With fermented snacks from Pao Liu, music from Goblin, and poetry from Kate Paul.
The exhibition is then open from 17th September - 2nd October
Thursday, Saturday, and Sundays, 1-6 pm
MoMS has commissioned Sean Roy Parker to make new work that will be shown at Phytology - a cultural institute based within Bethnal Green Nature Reserve. Phytology's public programme actively engages with the environmental and social complexities of the surrounding urban landscape.
mulch is a new living installation by artist, writer and gardener Sean Roy Parker created in, with and for plants at Phytology. Working amongst the ruins of a former market garden, Victorian church and bombsite rubble, Parker is reanimating layers of dirt, stories and history with the debris of a chaotic summer, relics of soft seasonal change, and a sculptural gift to the future.
Sheet composting, also known as a lasagne bed, is an indigenous horticulture technique (appropriated by Western permaculture) of building soil health with strata of organic matter that rot down over time and provide habitats for funghi, microbes and insects that break it down to release nutrients into the soil, completing a short yet dynamic life cycle and replenishing the ground ready for new life.
Tree limbs, municipal leaf litter, neighbourhood coffee grounds, donated, woodchip, deep time journalling, herbal offcasts, veg market surplus, cultural ephemera, deciduous needles. If successful composting requires organic media which contribute varied textures, weights and porosities, then it can only be enhanced by cultural media which hold varied knowledge, care and intentions. Globally, our soils have been rampantly dilapidated by extractivist monoculture farming, and mulch suggests that we can break the curse with slow, purposeful fermentation and interspecies intimacy.
Sign up to Sean Roy's substack here.