Tag: meadows

‘go touch grass: towards a poethics of meadowing’ at University of Nottingham, 13/12/23

 A21 Trent Building, Nottingham, NG72RD

 Wed 13th December 2023 3:30PM

This is a talk about meadows. A meadow is a place of expanse and exposure, where Man shoots the mother deer in the Disney classic Bambi (1942). It is a site of slag heaps, fly-tipping, wild and opportunistic overgrowth; the edge land between industrial estates sprung up with buddleia against the odds. Ambling between creative and critical approaches, this talk makes a case for the gerund meadowing as a conceptual and methodological imperative for porous and cross-pollinating consciousness. The excesses of meadows suggest how we might glean forms of abundance and ongoingness from the discards of capitalist efficiency. We will take seriously the imperative ‘go touch grass’, not as pastoral consolation or escape but rather as a cultivating logic of regeneration. The aesthetic tendencies of meadowing — dense citation practise, polyrhythmia, borrowing from the im/possibilities of dream — are entwined with an ecological ethic of entanglement and suspension.

Free tickets

Meadow Fractals for A Soft Landing

Sam Williams’ project, A Soft Landing, is ‘an online resource inspired by the activity of communal gardens and city allotments. It is a space where volunteers are invited to share, learn, contribute and care for themselves and others, through the sharing of material that could be used for nourishment, growth, pleasure, education or healing’.

I like this website because it’s what I want from the internet, a place to share and graft and cut and paste, to nourish and discover something unexpected. You tend a little plot and see what grows from it. I used to live near Woodlands Community Garden and loved seeing the flora and fauna change throughout the seasons, people volunteering, pulling out weeds and planting. Something of A Soft Landing is in this spirit: you might get asked to respond or contribute, you might volunteer yourself. You never really know what might crop up in the meantime, which is why there’s a satisfying ethic to ‘checking back’.

I’m happy to find a home for an ongoing and incomplete series, Meadow Fractals, among the leaf matter and stems of other makers. It features a sestina after Kevin Killian (and isn’t the sestina the most fractal traditional form?), plus some weird and tessellating meadow illustrations done on an MS Paint simulator. Long live Paint. You can find the full selection at a-soft-landing.com (look for the dark grey tendrils).

In recent months, I’ve also been reading Sean Roy Parker’s Fermental Health substack, which has got me excited about blogging, and even food again. Do have a read! 🌱