CULTIVATE THAT

Joseph Brown, Helen Butlin, Bea & Jill Finch, Orna Kazimi, Pear Nuallak, Kashif Sharma-Patel
March 5, 2022
 to May 28, 2022
Turf, 46-47 Trinity Court, Whitgift Centre, Croydon CR01UQ

Free & open to all

The act of cultivation involves fostering growth, providing support & encouragement via labour, care or study. Building on our learning from pilot project ‘Propagate This’ & continuing our focus on process over output, we will host 6 x artist residencies spanning the months of Spring 2022.

Taking new offshoots of our pilot as a starting point, ‘Cultivate That’ will follow through with our commitment to providing artists & local partners with tools to propagate new work; offering space, funding, time, support, local/national networks; & inviting audiences to be part of shaping conversations.

 

More info:

‘Cultivate That’ is a new project building on recent pilot, ‘Propagate This’, which was birthed directly in response to local & national crises. Last year amplified social issues particularly relevant to our hometown & called into question systems perpetuating them. With Croydon Council’s section 114 notice pushing Turf & public services into heightened states of precarity, the Croydon community had suffered effects of decisions made without us. It felt urgent to interrogate our relevance to the community we inhabit & work in ways that are responsive to what local people need.

 

In ‘Propagate This’ we shifted from creating exhibitions to offering an environment for sustainable & generative recovery through creativity & curiosity. Responding to the skills & needs of our local community, we sought to create opportunities for people to ask questions & respond to problems that are relevant to them, through workshops, events & provision of space & facilities. This generated a wealth of dialogue about our local area, urban regeneration, accessibility, who gets a say in decision-making, & where the arts sit within that. Our continued desire for our space is for it to feel even more rooted in the community & our community to feel rooted in the space. We want to further explore models of making decisions together so that art’s role is interwoven into society, not running alongside it; & we want to continue to support those artists we began conversations with in more sustained ways.

 

‘Propagate This’ used small points of entry to grow new experimental shoots. ‘Cultivate That’ continues this work, providing a supportive environment to continue to nurture the budding ideas of our new collaborators – locally-connected practitioners who enjoy co-creating & sharing ownership of ideas.

 

Drawing on artist feedback requesting more time to work together, we’ll host a residency programme that spans 3 months, providing space & time for people to continue to:

  1. Ask questions & respond to problems relevant to them.
  2. Reimagine alternative futures for space & community in Croydon.
  3. Explore new models of making & decision-making together.

 

Following our experiments with ‘Propagate This’ we will fully integrate our collectives’ programmes with the main gallery programme. Resident artists will work with our collectives & a local community organisation of their choice, activating the gallery, offsite poster, & digital spaces.

 

Resident artists will have access to free workspace & print facilities. Throughout the project, we’ll provide a skills-share & development programme of workshops & events open to resident artists & the public, delivered by the Turf team & invited local creatives.

 

There will be no set outcomes for the residencies, but we want each one to have long-term impact beyond the funding period & for processes to be publicly visible throughout. The project aims to hold a necessary local focus while maintaining relevance further afield in consideration of alternative working practices.

 

Cultivate That has been generously supported by Arts Council England.

  • Joseph Brown
With a practice concerned with the inhabitants and habitats of the natural world. My favourite medium to work with are pencils. Joseph is a Croydon School of Art graduate and current UAL student. Instagram: @jobrown_art Facebook: @JoBrownArt    
  • Helen Butlin
I am a poet/writer who has only recently felt comfortable saying that out loud! My work is varied in form and style but I am always interested in exploring what connects us and what keeps us apart. I have worked in mental health and bereavement for the last 15 years and see creativity as a key component of the human experience and our survival. Having studied American literature and poetry at Leeds University, I enjoy the thinking and theories of academia but believe they are most useful when they are accessible and open to everyone. I live with my partner, two children and cat in Purley on a steep hill which keeps my legs and lungs strong. Being in green spaces and finding pockets of nature in urban environments inspires. Twitter: @hbwriter_ Instagram: @hbwriter_ Website: murmurationsabc.com    
  • 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/
  • Orna Kazimi
Orna Kazimi is an Afghan visual artist based in London. Orna’s work and research explore personal encounters with migration in relation to collective memories of displacement through drawings, installation and writing. Her works have been shown at sight and sound workshop at Tate Exchange- Tate Modern- London 2018, overprint at Centre de la Gravure et de l’image imprimée museum-Belgium 2018, Art Amongst War: Visual Culture in Afghanistan-TCNJ Art Gallery- New Jersey 2014, 4th Afghan Contemporary Art Prize Exhibition- Queen’s Palace- Afghanistan 2013. She was awarded the Caspian Arts Foundation Scholarship (2016) and studied at the Central Saint Martins in London (2018). ornakazimi.com @ornakazimi
   
  • 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 us for the launch event of our spring residency project, Cultivate That, led by Andre Anderson of independent art school Freedom & Balance!
It’s a make-along! Come and have a peek in our gallery! 5 artists have joined together to create new and exciting things to share with people in Croydon. They have ONLY just started! Would you like to join in too?
A chance to get feedback on your work from a practicing artist in a supportive & friendly environment led by Freedom & Balance, featuring work from Cultivate That artists.
A chance to get feedback on your work from a practicing artist in a supportive & friendly environment from local legend John Hyde.
It’s a make-along! Come and have a peek in our gallery! 5 artists have joined together to create new and exciting things to share with people in Croydon. They have ONLY just started! Would you like to join in too?
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.

Writing:

Related Turf artists: