It’s unusually warm and the south facing window of Mote102 ArtSpace on Ferry Road has become a greenhouse. Seedlings of basil, rosemary, nasturtium, beetroot, dwarf bean and courgette bask in a wooden planter. The works form part of Fallow Land, a group show that represents the culmination of a residency hosted by Art Walk Projects. The planter stands in for artist James Wyness’ project, ‘Get Jed Fed’ which aims to grow food in unlikely spots in Jedburgh, such as outside a pub or a care home. Suspended next to them, throwing Calder-like shadows on the blind that is still pulled down when I arrive, are a number of porcelain casts of oyster shells, strung up with bright yellow polypropylene rope. Inside, another bunch hangs from the gallery’s skylight. Informed by an oyster farming project led by women in Maharashtra, India, ‘Récif d’huitres (oyster reef)’ (2025), by Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose, speaks directly to the methods and materials of farming. Three ropes are all suspended from a central point, allowing the porcelain shells to overlap. This close proximity suggests the damage that would be done to the sculptures in a strong current or gust and the precarity of ecosystems amid uncertain weather patterns.
Where the texture of the porcelain shells – glazed on the inside, rough on the outside – create a desire to touch, their fragility dissuades. Haptic engagement is explicitly encouraged, however, in Hanna Paniutsich’s ‘Your Body and the Ground’ (2025), where a copper plate mounted on the wall bears the outline of a hand. It is connected by wires to a multimeter and a metal rod. The gallery text signals that another rod has been placed in the narrow strip of soil running along the eastern side of the gallery, populated by dandelions and other plants that like cracks and edgelands. I place my hand on the plate, pick up the rod and close the loop, making a circuit between myself and the ground. With this work, the artist examines the idea of ‘grounding’ or ‘earthing’, proponents of which claim that direct contact with the negative electrical charge of the earth can help to combat free radicals in the body.
Living things are live, electrically speaking. The body, the soil, pulse with life. What is fallow is not inactive. Another work by Paniutsich, ‘Soil Power 1’ (2025), comprises three tubes of glass filled with soil that further consider the ability of soil to act as a conductor. They remind me a little of Helen Chadwick’s ‘Carcass’ (1986), but where Chadwick’s tower of compost evokes the abjection of active decay, here the soil and its microbes feel dulled by this clean, controlled environment that is anathema to the ground they came from.
Moving through the gallery I am drawn to a slender cherry tree severed from the ground and now jutting out of the back wall, festooned with strips of birch bark. Their deep red colour inevitably recalls flayed flesh. Words are written in Arabic on the surface: memories, we are told, of land stripped from its inhabitants, who are now displaced in Scotland. Henna Asikainen’s ‘We lived from our cherry orchards but they are all cut down now’ (2025) is accompanied by ‘Roots and Soil’ (2025), a sculpture that makes this upheaval explicit. A sycamore tree has been tipped on its head so that the roots fan out, still holding traces of the soil it once occupied. In the publication that accompanies the exhibition, Asikainen speaks about meeting a group of older Syrian women who arrived here as refugees, leaving behind beloved land, livestock, and fruit trees, and suggests that unproductive spaces – either fallow by choice or force – can offer space for new forms of resistance to flourish. Looking again at the papery strips that hang like ribbons I am reminded of the power of bark and skin to renew itself after a wound.
Occupying the whole backroom, Wyness’ installation ‘Set Aside’ (2025) includes a video of the artist walking in a field dressed in the traditional guise of a farmer – flat cap, Barbour vest, checked shirt. As I enter the space he is swinging a microphone like a censer, then he lies down and holds it up as if to interview the sky. Next, he has pulled out some string, appears to be surveying, using his body as a yardstick. A Land Rover appears, a map is unfolded on the ground. Looking the part is half the work of access and ownership in the UK – a white man dressed like this will not be questioned, as many racialised artists and writers, such as Ingrid Pollard and Jason Allen Paisant, have already explored. In one part of the performance, his costume is troubled by the addition of a Palestinian keffiyeh – a momentary nod to those who do not have the right to roam even on their own land.
Because I am no farmer, no grower, no landowner beyond the square feet of the tenement I share, the title of the exhibition prompts questions before I have even seen it. Will the fields become fallow if the crops succumb to this drought? Is land still fallow if it’s used for pasture? If land is ‘rewilded’, does that count as fallow? Does there have to be an intention to return? What else comes in when crops are temporarily banished? How do you know when the soil is exhausted? Why are we not more alarmed that we have less than sixty harvests left?
Fallow Land goes some way to exploring these questions, through work that looks at land use, ownership and abandonment, and the ability for this agricultural term to be considered from different angles. The strongest pieces in the show speak to this connection between land and displacement, body and earth, going beyond a performative relationship or reenactment to remind us how much is at stake for those who are colonised and displaced, how innovative ways of thinking about the way we occupy and use the land will help us in a warming and hostile world.
The curator points me towards a garden in Portobello that also forms part of the show. I make my way on foot, crossing the Leith links and then heading down an A-road lined with large commercial buildings that cut off access to the water. When I finally join the seafront, it is deserted, and it occurs to me that this could be considered the fallow end of the long stretch of sand, not yet gentrified like the busy promenade around Portobello Beach.
The garden itself is a strip of land in front of the public toilets on Pipe Lane, framed by a floral mosaic. Shells, pottery shards and stones demarcate where oyster leaf – edible and mollusc-flavoured – has been planted by Kanhye and La Rose. The oyster leaf plants are still small; they don’t look like much yet, but ask us to consider what is waiting to be used in a new way. Such experiments remind us that we hold a responsibility to the ground beneath our feet, that the entangled threats of colonialism, fascism and climate require resistance, and that we can always do more.
Maria Howard is a writer and artist based in Glasgow.
Fallow Land was at Mote102 Artspace, 102 Ferry Road Leith Edinburgh from 9-17 May 2025.
This review is supported by Art Walk Projects.
Published 17.06.2025 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
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