This first appeared in ECO-CRIPS, an excellent e-zine published by Olivia Dreisinger in April 2020 that features some great artworks and new writing on environmental disability. Olivia has kindly let me share it for free, so Download here :)
It was a turning point for me with regards to how I saw the work I have been making over the past three years, and I was asked questions that held a deep understanding of my practice and its relationship to mental health struggles.
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OD First off, please tell us a little about yourself and your different projects.
SRP I’m a stocky, sincere, passionate human with a penchant for pickles, living in the city but destined to go off-grid. I see myself as a multimedia visual artist and environmental activist, mostly working with surplus or abundant materials to develop post-capital language and chaos aesthetics around waste, collaboration and food. I worked full-time in hospitality for years and my practice (and mental health) suffered so turned freelance four years ago and have slowly been reclaiming my labour ever since. I’ve had a good balance for around two years, with small art commissions and sales supporting a longer thread of food justice work.
I run Surplus Canteen, a social pay-what-you-can project using waste food saved from landfill, work as an associate artist on a radical green syllabus with pupils at a local secondary (middle) school, and lead practical well-being workshops with regional galleries and charities, focussing on food and craft. In my spare time I volunteer at a local community garden learning how to grow organics and use my studio to make physical work or drink tea while answering emails and listening to DJ Rashad (rip).
installation shot of in)organic-matter(s, in Wandle Park, Croydon for Turf Projects, 2019
OD You describe yourself as an eco-anxious artist and cook. How does eco-anxiety come into your practice?
SRP For about five years I’ve been experiencing bouts of low mood and spontaneous anxiety stemming from a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. It manifests in many ways including recluding for days on end, serial procrastination and avoidance from responsibilities, elongated dread and sadness, unplanned crying, sweating or panicking. I think these are related to some personal emotional traumas that I’m slowly unpacking in therapy, but I’ve also been trying to hone in on how the artwork I’ve made over the last decade might have been a coping mechanism all along: collage and sculpture made from found objects, scrappy ephemera pamphlets, films made with user-driven content from early YouTube, tidying up rituals and performative litter picking, collecting and archiving debris. Often it’s just a case of sporadically making something when the materials are immediately to hand, and never ever planning (my therapist says I have an adaptive personality).
I’m thankful to now be more aware of its connection to ecological collapse, working class oppression and extractive capitalism, but was missing the critical understanding or emotional lexis until fairly recently when I became social with and educated by others in similar mindsets, consuming drag cabaret, queer culture, home cooking and environmental activism through performance, curation, writing or visual art. Reading ‘Decolonializing Nature’ by T. J. Demos and ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz really brought a microscope to some wider themes of interest that I hadn’t figured out, and artwork by Susan Cianciolo, Aaron Noah Graham or Sharona Franklin often shakes me to the core with its plurality of meanings, textures and lenses.
Largely, I’ve come to the realisation that the diverse threads of my practice are connected by and move through me as the nucleus. Food, rubbish, thoughts, words, textiles move towards me and through or around me, undergoing sometimes deft, sometimes heavy transformation and the wider result is that my dinner looks like a sculpture and an unthinking phone photo a collage.
It’s hard to imagine how I would return to having separation between ‘art’ and ‘life’, and I find it genuinely incredulous how many practitioners can leave their activism in the studio, or avoid bringing emotionality into it at all. In my opinion it’s nowhere near enough to make passive work about the environment - that’s simultaneously vapid and dangerous as it embodies the flippancy of art-making in a market. It is man trying to control the chaos of nature through symbolism and representation, a classically colonialist approach; the distance between subject and object is vast but focussed, stable but desirable, sellable. I try to make work in, of, with, amongst, and for the environment, as often it’s the only way I can thoroughly process the knot of thoughts and feelings around late capitalism and climate crisis. Even writing this interview is helping me move my work into new territory, another recording medium that unfolds in front of me.
OD Your projects seem to really push to make your environmentalism diverse and inclusive of many communities: from skill-sharing workshops, to litter pick picnics, to community meals. What is your relationship to litter, foraged/found plant debris, and fermental health?
SRP Originally I made work from found materials as an economic necessity - free samples, post-consumer rubbish, studio leftovers, natural debris - because I couldn't afford to buy canvasses or pre-cut wood etc. I began seeing discarded plastics, floor sweepings, fallen plums as missed opportunities, as if I had tapped into an infinite resource, invisible to others. The quantity, state of decay and location of objects all fed into the emotional experience of encountering and became the bedrock for new language around environmentalism. This has now become a tested methodology that is prevalent in most of my work, and has allowed me to open my practice to others without being protective.
Content Wallet made in collaboration with Hugh Frost for a duo show at Good Press, Glasgow
One example is my ongoing series 'Content Wallets', an accidental archival of polythene bags containing scraps of other work, spent tape, dry used tea bags, apple cores, glitter and sweets, coins, old notes, that I would scoop up at the end of the studio day and leave on my desk rather than binning. First thing the next day I would scan them, now I make them on purpose when my desk is getting chaotic. The execution has become more slick over time, but the mundanity of the objects is what makes them annoyingly simple. Making ‘content wallets’ has become a weekly task for the middle school students I work with, as both a tidy-up and catalogue.
When leading wildflower walks I always announce my amateurism as I think it’s key to breaking down the conventional relationship between teacher and pupil, and setting the tone for a more horizontal learning structure. I often mis-identify flora or cross-check with my guide or google, creating space to be corrected and share the workload, thus developing an approachable technique that relies more on feeling that fact. Here I value the input of my collaborators, rather than the ultimate scientific truth, and engage diverse thoughts and concepts as multiple non-linear realities, which is so much more fun than always being right.
‘Fermental Health’ is a long-term project started last year that I think will contain a sprawling body of work, started after I came up with the name in bed and couldn’t stop feeling smug about it for three days. My research stems from eco-anxiety around wasteful and oppressive global food systems and how our hyper-processed diet has had a range of negative impacts on our collective mental well-being, gut health and plastic consumption. Looking at loneliness, malnutrition and poverty as both factors and consequences of our disconnection from food and each other, I want to explore the potential physical, psychological and social benefits of making, eating and sharing fermented foods. My food justice work takes form as surplus food redistribution and traditional preservation workshops using leftovers, enlarging how positive local civic action and practical skill-sharing create community resilience with multitudinous outcomes which change shape depending on the needs of the recipients.
OD After looking at some of your work, like IN)ORGANIC~MATTER(S, I’ve been thinking a lot about the complicated relationship between community clean-up initiatives and gentrification. Trash and waste streams decrease property value—waste streams are always higher in lower income neighbourhoods—and attract investors into the area. Gentrification, under the guise of “betterment,” becomes a rather sinister form of land dispossession for these communities. Scavenging vs foraging also has a lot of the same messy attachments to one another (i.e. scavenging is often criminalized/racialized while foraging is not). How can “rewilding the commons” make our communities more resilient in the wake of these toxic ecologies? I’m also thinking that “rewilding” requires little maintenance, reduces toxic pesticide exposure, increases biodiversity, and gives people access to beautifully resilient plant medicine.
SRP This is a good read of that project, Olivia, I appreciate you! It was my first public commission and I wanted to make a body of work that not only documented and critiqued the effects of lazy citizenning in public greenspace, but also honed in on the potential for ‘unconscious rewilding’ to piggyback the reduction of council spending which has led to increasingly infrequent maintenance of the commons. For me the litter pick was a social task; I go out cleaning alone fairly regularly, and suggest it as a background activity for meetings rather than sitting uncomfortably in corporate coffee shops. I want my practice to push a broader co-operative agenda around the confusion and avoidance of civic responsibility through spending slow time outside with others.
I use the terms ‘scavenging’ and ‘foraging’ interchangeably in my work but hadn't picked up on the perceptional dissidence. There is a shit load of stigma around picking up anything unwanted or overlooked - edible plants, discarded wood, spoiled food - as if it belongs to the state. Recently I’ve had people scolding me for picking three-corner leek in parks as it’s a “protected plant” when according to an expert friend it’s classified invasive in London. This community policing (and enlarged privilege) comes from a learned conformity, persecuting others because of a jealousy of their freedom. I believe this is the same reason why many able-bodied, neurotypical fxlk are scared of the disabled and neurodiverse community; self-expression is the opposite of repression. Normativity is comfortable, controlled, labelled nicely in a supermarket.
One of the most prominent issues is how to deal with the privatisation of abundance, and how these organic and inorganic bodies become engulfed in a sort of ownership vacuum. Reconnecting with nature through foraging or scavenging is to challenge these toxic social codes and entertain alternative post-capital lifestyles. The commons are key political battlegrounds in the UK at the moment, as our ancient woodlands are being mercilessly destroyed to make way for high-speed trains networks, and telecom conglomerates are capitalising on enforced isolation by upping 5G antenna in every crevice of the country and fuck knows what they will do to our bodies. I think about the ravaging of nature for financial gain a lot, especially as poor people in this country repeatedly vote against their own interests, and their rights, access and freedom are repeatedly squeezed against a promise.
OD What’s the climate of food deserts and food poverty like in London? I’m particularly interested in surplus food, food re/distribution, and the history of charity/communal eating spaces in your city since it looks a lot different here in Canada.
SRP I can’t claim to be an expert on socio-economic deprivation in London, but through the radical food projects I’ve been conducting over the last two years I’ve met a plethora of people living on the breadline, many who have slipped through the gaps of social care. After working as an employment coach for a small charity supporting adults with learning disabilities into paid work, and volunteering with a couple of organisations providing supported studios for artists with autism, I became acutely aware of the daily barriers faced by these individuals to care, to culture, to food. I’ve been slowly dragging the canteen project I’ve been developing with Brixton Pound away from a financial model deeply embedded in an oppressive and competitive private sector, and trying to take it somewhere closer to the low-cost social eating spaces opened across the UK following both world wars. Elliot from National Food Service - a cross-city volunteer-run organisation committed to food activism and political lobbying - opened my eyes to National Kitchens, where the working classes were fed heartily by local teams of cooks using seasonal ingredients and community abundance.
Ultimately I see the Surplus Canteen as a space to redress the issue of access to food and support for health and well-being amongst those who have been excluded socially, financially or otherwise from food sharing. I’m trying to flip the hospitality model by adopting a pay-what-you-can model which dulls the consumer’s historical power and managing their expectations in a way that normative businesses do not, as well as inviting a range of voices to contribute, through taking on volunteers with learning disabilities, hosting ‘crafternoons’ for single parent families, and publishing affordable pamphlets of our recipes.
Brixton Pound Cafe, a pay-what-you-can cafe using surplus food run by the artist 2018-2020
OD What’s next for you?
SRP As you can imagine, most projects are on hold, and I’m spending almost all my time thinking about, making, fermenting or eating food. For me it’s linked to comfort and control, being able to work with slow food as an antidote to the chaos. It kind of feels like I’m contradicting myself from earlier when I spoke about the colonial approach to representing nature through art, so this is something I’m going to reflect on. Currently I’m making soda bread, developing new ferments, cooking with ancient grains and wild foods collected on Government-sanctioned walks, with a plan to form an open-source long-form recipe platform called Fermental Health.
Art now seems totally futile except as hobby or distraction, even though I fundamentally believe it is the tool rather than the product. Low-income freelancers are being heavily financially punished in the UK for not conforming to Christian-driven conservative lifestyle guidelines, with accessible aid only offered if you earn over 50% through freelance work, and artists are being pitted against each other to prove how poor they are in order to claim funding, providing they have a solid background of institutionally-acceptable work. I’ve already given up hope on a residency to Lithuania that I was awarded. My main near-term project is containing anxiety, pushing against numbness and catching up with friends. And making yoghurt.
--Sean Roy Parker is a visual artist and environmentalist living in Lewisham, South London, UK. His practice focuses on material lifecycles, complexities of civic responsibility, and collaboration as methodology. Parker creates post-capitalist frameworks for distributing abundance and care, encouraging multiple non-linear narratives and alternative currencies.