Fungus Press Residency: Cultivate That

Bea & Jill Finch, Pear Nuallak, Kashif Sharma-Patel
April 24, 2022
 to May 31, 2022

Free & open to all

This edition of Fungus Press poster commissions presents work by three resident artists participating in current project ‘Cultivate That’. The residency aims to provide space & time for artists with local connections to: ask questions & respond to problems relevant to them; reimagine alternative futures for space & community in Croydon; & explore new models of making & decision-making together.

The Park Hill Park site plays host to a poster artwork by artist, writer, sculptor, & thinker Bea Finch & their mum, creative & project facilitator Jill Finch. The work, titled ‘this is me, then there is us, and then there is outwards’, is part of a wider project in collaboration with National Autistic Society Youth Club, Croydon; about ourselves, those close to us, & our future. Outcomes from the workshops will be added to the poster as the project develops.

“The first session will run in our youth club space, which is familiar and safe. This session is about ourselves as individuals. The second session will run in Turf Projects, which is a new space, but is designed to be accessible. This session is about us as a group. The third session will run in Park Hill Park, specifically in the walled garden, which is a new outside space with little protection from sensory stimuli. This session is about our wider environment and future.” – Bea

 

Artist Pear Nuallak takes residence across the two poster sites in Wandle Park with work titled ‘until further notice’. The posters ask questions about the green spaces that are part of Croydon’s heritage: what does a “green space” mean, who gets to access them, & what are the stories we’ve made up about the land?

“3 – 4 miles from Wandle Park is a small path that runs along the top of Pinewood, Shirley. I walked to and from school as a child here, intent on telling stories to my parents, oblivious to rules that carved up land.

Here is a story: In Pinewood, mosses and liverworts form their own worlds where nobody tells you where to go and the air is always very good. You can hear Peter Andre singing ‘Mysterious Girl’ as he frolics in the lost rivers of London, and there’s the lingering scent of ‘Mitsouko’ by Guerlain, whose richness relies on oakmoss, a lichen that thrives in pure air.” – Pear

 

Our Reeves Corner site displays work by poet, editor & artist Kashif Sharma-Patel, titled ‘pared back / suburban infinite’. The posters deploy & arrange aspects of analogue photography, late modernist verse, anarchist & Croydon School of Art alumnus Jamie Reid’s ‘Suburban Press’ & Aimé Césaire to think through the myriad experiences of urban life in Croydon.

“There is a latent energy in the (sub)urban trickling through the lyrical everyday, captured at the ephemeral edges of corporate decay and managed decline. Artifice rears its head back in bouts of awesome sublime as cranes tower and green loiters in enclosed pockets. The present holds the past and future in shards of collective imagining and cultural memory through re-examining the landscape that engulfs us.” – Kashif

Listen to the Fungus Press audio descriptions here:

 

Click here to view a transcript of ‘Until Further Notice’ by Pear Nuallak

Cultivate That has been generously supported by Arts Council England.

 

 

 

  • Bea & Jill Finch
I’m Bea
I’m a young creator; artist, writer, sculptor, thinker. I’m non-binary, genderfluid and my pronouns are they, them, theirs. I’m disabled and neuro-diverse, which I show a lot in my creative work. I’m a synaesthete; my senses are blurred together and what I see I can feel. I mostly work in digital illustration; I enjoy drawing graphical portraits because I find faces and expressions fascinating. You can find my work on my instagram: @beatrixfinch/
My disability creates a mental barrier between what I want to say and what I can say. I have decided to do this project with my mum as a carer and creative partner. Sometimes one can build another.
I’m Jill
Primarily I’m here to support and facilitate Bea but I hope that I can add value and energy to the project for other participants, the process and its outcomes too.  Plus, I irrationally adore Croydon. My current personal obsession is liminality, in part triggered by the pandemic.  Liminal moments, times and spaces, individual and collective; how to exist in them in a beneficial way, how mindful creativity might help… My instagram is: @jilliganito/
  • Pear Nuallak
I respond to this overwhelming world by making the natural into the strange and the strange into the natural. This can take the form of knitting funny creatures, drawing cartoons, embroidering toile de jouy, writing speculative fiction, or wandering the woods. This wide-ranging practise is vital to feeling out all the conundrums, contradictions, and problems that arise as I experience life on this naughty earth. Most of my questions are focused on my relationship to the land on which I live, including Croydon, where I spent the first two-thirds of my life. My questions are slowly answered through this making / dreaming / wandering process, as well as more traditional academic research into the history of the land, materials, and social relations. Making things, real or imagined, helps me think of how we can unmake the violent, extractive relationships that structure our world. Moving fluidly between art and craft, “high” culture and “low” culture, the historical and the imaginative helps people find my work. The embedding of art within community and the importance of material as the basis for coalitional struggle and fabulous textiles are my guiding principles for art and revolution. @pearpiesyrup
   
  • Kashif Sharma-Patel

I am a poet, editor and artist raised in Croydon, though currently based in Elephant and Castle. Much of my work is concerned with reflecting on everyday urban experience, particularly through the lens of racialisation and gendering, and developing creative expression for that. I am interested in deconstructing policy-driven language with regard to development and futures, instead trying to find cross-cultural and innovative methods that may be submerged within the wider social ecosystem we reside. Croydon as a post-industrial brutalist multiculture is a prime site for thinking the wider picture through. I also see that as something tied to uncovering our sense of history, whether that be tied up in diaspora, industry, or everyday culture. While much of my work is poetry-oriented, I have worked with sound and performance, and I am keen to develop how we can collectively and consciously desediment collective pasts. I am an editor at the 87 Press, a small press for innovative poetry, and write freelance for art, literary and music magazines with a focus on queer and racialised experimental work.

youngdevi.wordpress.com

Twitter: @kshgr_fashanu 

Insta: @kashif1917

Related events:

Join the 'Cultivate That' artists and the Turf team for a celebratory lunch, and intro to the project - an opportunity to explore the new offshoots this residency programme has cultivated.

Related Turf artists: