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The Commons Artists
Catherine Morland is interested in plant-based crafts from a feminist perspective. For this project she has researched traditional skills usually associated with women’s work to foreground the detrimental effect enclosures have on reproductive labour. Using weaving, basketry, knots and cordage she made three installation pieces and a group of vessels for display in the Museum’s galleries. She is co-curator of The Commons: Re-enchanting the World.
Catherine Morland
Amanda Couch researches, reinterprets and reimagines histories, myth, ritual and embodied knowledge. Becoming with Wheat (and Other More-Than-Human Others) explores this interspecies kinship: a collective or commons that embodies the idea that we are all in relation, interdependent and interconnected. Along with ‘Becoming with Wheat Companions’, she cultivated wheat in The MERL gardens, exhibiting films, anthotypes and sculptural masks. Amanda also collaborated with Josefin Vargö for the Commons Feast part of the Virtual Launch. She is co-curator of The Commons: Re-enchanting the World.
Amanda Couch
Sam Wallman is a comics-journalist, cartoonist and labour activist based in narrm / Melbourne Australia, mostly on Wurundjeri country. Having worked as an organiser for the United Workers Union, he has drawn for hundreds of trade unions and worker organisations around the world. Referencing trade union standards in The MERL collection, he created a banner that calls us to ‘Reclaim the Commons!’ from their enclosure, one of the ruling class’s original sins – a bad seed of so many of our crises, all crashing together and Intertwining.
Sam Wallman
Sigrid Holmwood expands painting by following the colonial histories of the plants she uses to make her pigments and dyes. She plays with the contrast between images of peasants used to construct national romanticisms, and paintings by peasants using hybrid mixtures of local, imported, and migrated plant life. Thereby, highlighting the entangled histories between the rural European proletariat and colonised indigenous peoples.
Sigrid Holmwood
Kelechi Anucha and Carl Gent first met as plot-holders on an allotment in New Cross, south east London. Since 2020, they have been looking at and working with English folk music, its relationship to church song, its slippery place within the English imaginary and its subversive potential as a sonic commons. Utilising a very personal collection of technology and instrumentation, they have recorded new renditions of folk songs hosted inside different sculptures and installations exhibited at the MERL and Wysing Arts Centre during 2021.
Carl Gent & Kelechi Anucha
Josefin Vargö is a food experience artist, designer and independent curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. Often by exploring connections between the different senses, Josefin offers moments to consider diverse ways of being. Central to Josefin’s participation in The Commons was her Levande Arkivet (The Living Archive) a collection of eighty sourdough cultures gifted to her from bakers around the world which she shared with participants of ‘The Virtual Commons Feast’ to kick start their own sourdough breadmaking.
Josefin Vargö
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