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
Cultivate That has been generously supported by Arts Council England.
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.
Twitter: @kshgr_fashanu
Insta: @kashif1917
Est 2013, Turf is Croydon’s homegrown art space; free exhibitions & workshops, studios & collectives run by creatives for creatives.
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