As someone who spends a lot of time growing food, collaborating with farmers, and wrangling with wild plants, all to manage my own mental health in the slow apocalypse, I know a hoe from a hori-hori, a cucurbit from a calendula. To soothe the pain of my own landlessness I teach home fermentation to community gardeners, make living compost from kitchen scraps and commercial detritus, or write about witnessing the incremental shift of seasons on a regular walking route. It’s my responsibility to use the privilege of being an artist to communicate as effectively as I can what I see. With climate breakdown affecting our ecosystem in increasingly extreme (and normalised) ways, overstanding ecological land management in relation to human habits is necessary for dealing with the threats and actual impacts of floods, drought and biodiversity loss. Actively reanimating dead soil alongside our own sterile guts with radical yeasts and diverse microbes is a pre-modern technology we must recuperate. I could not argue a stronger case for using public arts money to bring civilians into the thick of ecological action in real time, a mode the art world clearly struggles to do beyond punchy slogans and short-lived exhibition themes. We desperately need the complexity of non-didactic artmaking with (more-than) humans to forge a path out of crisis, or, more likely, directly into it with a survival kit.
The majority of my work, and the type of art-making I am generally commissioned for, is categorised as ‘Social Practice’. This ‘art-speak’ term is not something I use myself; it’s too vague and says little about the content and aims of my work. However, I have begun to find Social Practice useful as a descriptor for a type of labour that prioritises connection over profit and carves out moments to resist neoliberalism’s death drive in a way that feels authentic and offers hope. For me, doing ‘Social Practice’ means to seek out autonomy, build interpersonal connections and destabilise transactional learning hierarchies. For example, teaching local farmers how to make sauerkraut with cabbages they’ve grown is a form of timebending and a gift to their future selves; extensively walking unfamiliar territories with strangers and recognising edible or medicinal plants helps me to ground my body in place. Being able to share this process alongside propagating my own nourishment means I can give away fragments of my ‘starter culture’ that will never exhaust. These methodologies are inspired by degrowth thinking, a conceptual framework that urges the abandonment of traditional economic measures of success or progress, and restructuring an alternative future around the well-being and safety of civilians.
In preparation for this text, I was invited to Grand Union, the celebrated artist-run organisation in Birmingham – entering its fifteenth year of operation, to see one such site of ‘Social Practice’ on a public right-of-way along Digbeth’s canal network, accessible from Fazeley Bridge. The land is currently borrowed for a period of time from Homes England, but treated, in the words of Grand Union’s Co-Programme Director Jo Capper, as a ‘fifty-year dream’. This canalside project is part of a wider vision – as Grand Union embark upon ambitious renovations of the former Canal Office building which sits adjacent to the site, where they’ve begun to imagine a new community-serving arts space.
According to their mission statement, a key tenet of ‘The Growing Project’–Grand Union’s free weekly programme running since 2021 to support local individuals and groups through cooking, gardening and art-making in various locations around the borough–is ‘to create space for peoples’ varied and sometimes complex needs, where productivity is not the driving force’. For many people ground down by the mechanisms of late capitalism, simply putting hands in dirt is an act of rebellion and rejuvenation. Offering attendees physical exertion, social interaction, or simply the chance to sit and watch the world go by, The Growing Project instigates a strand of mutual aid that challenges unnecessary hierarchies and outcome-oriented models of engagement perpetuated by museums and galleries with spreadsheets to fill. This unbuckling of expectations leaves room for curiosity, questioning and chance. Art is not the product but the reason to be here, an impetus to gather and reconfigure reality, to meet the needs of those present.
Thus, the gradual decluttering, rescaping and futureproofing of what was once feral scrub bank by Grand Union and their ‘Cultivators’—an intergenerational group of gardeners, ecologists, artists, compost enthusiasts, soil health advocates and sociologists who meet every Friday to undertake paid gardening work—goes some way to illustrating how effective non-extractive person-centred programming can be. Despite sitting well outside of what is generally understood as being ‘art’ by the wider public, this land regeneration project demands at the very least an expanded reading of how art permeates people’s lives through the gaps left by public services long evaporated. It’s important to acutely recognise the emotional and spiritual rewards of nurturing relationships with greenspaces for marginalised persons, even temporarily, in unstructured ways. In cities like Birmingham, where the tendency of municipal groundskeepers is to tame parks too vigorously, and access to land of one’s own is a rare affordance, the transference of greenspaces into common use that can be tended to with amateurship and attention could not be more necessary for salving the mental health epidemic brought on by continuous extraction of labour from humans, often against their will.
As we saunter down the canal, Jo tells me about a PhD student from the University of Birmingham who has been studying from this site to research phytoremediation, or how plants can metabolise toxicity in soils, inspired by a year-long commission by Pakistani-American artist Asad Raza on the same subject. Dedicated artistic-academic study not only intersects with embodied gardening harmoniously, it also legitimises the time spent developing slow interspecies intimacies through low-intervention looking. The project and its Cultivators are nibbling and disentangling the knots of historical ownership, messily and in full public view. This is also a form of composting in my eyes: adding layers of context to attract different practitioners; leaving layers of detritus to attract different decomposers; applying attention and allowing time to lead the change. This multifaceted approach no doubt is what also laid the groundwork for a three-year placemaking project by artist duo Cooking Sections, delving into the industrial histories of coloniality and commerce using the canal network.
‘The Floating Garden’, buoyant since 2023, is being repaired by Grand Union’s Cultivators and Growing Project team leader Kieran as I approach the site. It features native grasses and reeds known for their purification properties growing in large clumps and suspended in cages, with the main body of the pontoon made from compressed polyurethane planks resembling stained pub benches. These bow over the backs of floats made from empty 200L barrels sealed shut with latex. Several human bodies are swaying on the contraption, moored to the towpath with a fancy knot. They giggle while breathlessly forcing a replacement barrel-cum-float underneath the planks. This is what DIY is! Distributing responsibility between members! Dismantling hierarchies reliant on individual vision! Deconstructing success for the benefit of experience!
In 2023 Birmingham City Council announced its bankruptcy, citing a hole of £300 million in its finances and the concession that £750 million in cuts would need to be made by April 2026, and in an increasingly public feud with Labour Councillors, Birmingham’s bin workers have been intermittently striking ever since. Rubbish building up across the city has attracted national attention and local vermin; a convenient distraction from the Council’s professional incompetence while they stoke the flames of division. On top of steaming piles of waste, class conflict pertains to the ‘fire sale’ of land across Digbeth, privatising what little space is left where people can be together in unstructured ways without spending money. The mechanisms of corporate development in this neighbourhood signal a familiar pattern of gentrification that instrumentalises artists and cultural workers as catalysts for change before discarding them when the money rolls in.
Members of the Digbeth arts community however, so incredibly well-adapted to this ecology of rot, have become such effective decomposers that they continue to operate in the crevices without much trouble, and with the gutting still ongoing around them. They work in the very foundations, sharing resources, performing mutual aid and becoming immovable. I am thinking about a species of mycorrhizal fungi I recently found while digging up the rocks from under a barn in rural Czech Republic that clings on in damp places and eats concrete. I am thinking about how every time I make a fresh compost bay, thousands of wriggling dendrobæna worms find their way back from across my Derbyshire allotment despite having been evicted into veg beds last season. Critical species spawn anew, multiply, cut-and-come back like bindweed. Those here in Digbeth are also conniving and conspiring in the best possible way. Artist-run hives of activity—Centrala, Eastside Projects, Free House, Recent Activity, Stryx, Vivid Projects and Grand Union—are all stalwarts of the scene, enriching the substrate with dynamic programming of events, exhibitions and residencies that invite a diverse range of practitioners, many of whom directly respond to the stimuli of the ever-changing environment and its inhabitants.
It is well known that Social Practice can suffer from poor documentation. I often have composed in my head the best shots for a sauerkraut workshop, foraging walk or communal meal I am organising, but will rarely have a spare moment, or a hand not covered in soil or trefoil or oil, to pull out a camera. It is difficult even for the most consummate professional to make chopping and salting a cabbage look exciting, though many have tried. The participants are likely hyperfocussed on a task, the lead-artist likely mid-oration. Ultimately, I have to ask: if everyone who matters was there, who else does it matter to show this to?
The day I visit Digbeth, the Canal & River Trust have set up stations along the towpath near to Junction Works where uniformed instructors are teaching first-timers to fish in the lock with rods and maggots in the beating sun. I am tempted to wait for a turn, but clock that clipboards and digital cameras outnumber the rods, which tends to denote data collection and documentation taking precedence over learning experience. This glib ruse for photographic evidence is a perfect example of how funding bodies would ideally like arts organisations to operate: performative teaching that provides smiling photos which, with the checking of a tickbox, can be used freely for marketing.
As a salve to this, Grand Union prescribes their own measurements of projects’ success as a methodology for self-affirmation; yearly qualitative and observational reports by Dr Jenny Peever; end-of-the-summer Harvest Picnics where collaborators and participants gather to share food and stories; commissioning artist Mengxia Liu to produce ‘The Collaborative Map’ as a way to narrativising the sprawling web of people, places and practices that make all that happens possible. The thread connecting these forms of communal digestion is the gathering of what Jo calls ‘glimmers’—a way of noticing moments of learning or connection almost imperceptible to the eye and incompatible with a clipboard. By gathering written testimonials, observational analysis and imbuing a sincere depth of care into the infrastructure of their artistic operations, Grand Union rejects traditional data harvesting, instead allowing those who interlude with their programme to express its impact themselves, through their own words, actions and relationships. Simply put, in a world bloated with predetermined meaning and unspoken expectation, it will suffice to see the deepest complexities of life unfold slowly, in front of us, together.
*Grand Union have requested that Jo Capper be referred to by her first name in this text.
Sean Roy Parker is an artist, writer and landworker based in Derbyshire.
This feature is supported by Grand Union. It is the second in a trilogy of commissioned texts exploring their relationship to people and place during their 15th birthday year.
Published 13.11.2025 by Kevin Hunt in Feature
2,048 words