An Art/Archaeology of the Runner Bean Patch

Toad

Bumble bee

Slug

Me

Bamboo

Hemp twine

Top Soil

Compost

Milk cartons

PET water bottles

I thought it began with a toad.

While watering the runner beans in my partly re-wilded garden I surprised this individual, presumably feasting on slugs and snails normally slung over the fence. They leapt but paused under a bean leaf, plainly in my sight, confident, showing me up as the interloper. Clearly, we both possessed a claim to the patch.

The beans had become an overlapping space; for feeding, hunting, dwelling, and other meanwhile activities. Created by me planting seeds and caring enough to water them nearly daily, it had become a more-than-human space. I wondered who else passed through. 

The patch also contains other slightly unexpected objects; upended plastic bottles and milk cartons, shells and remains of columbine snapped off by me. Its being was made up of more than life and I wanted to include these diverse things, everything which contributed to making it just so. Thus the Art-Archaeology Project of the Runner Bean Patch began. 

Archaeology: the study of material culture encompassing past and living ecologies, inanimate things and traces of activity. 

Art: a contemporary culture of talking beyond words about anything and everything.

Sepsis punctum (a fly)

Green Sheild Bug

Gatekeeper

Snail

Limpet (dec’d)

Update:

Sheep-strike Greenbottle Fly

Honey Bee

Columbine

Dandelion.

It helps to state an intention when beginning a project. This one will involve hand-printed drawings made to explore the bean’s community by cataloguing them, and also hand-made paper to enable the materiality of the space, and its galvanising occupants the beans and the soils, to have presence in the final work. 

The two artistic methodologies go nicely together and take care of waste practice prints, and reduce project costs. Making bean paper will set a reasonable medium-term timescale since the beans are just coming into flower now, following the 2026 July heatwave, and could conceivably fruit until early-October; enough to develop drawings and printing plates to print on paper made from cut down bean stems in October. 

Here’s the full idea: I’d have to learn a new skill; kitchen lithography, an environmentally-friendly hand printing technique suitable for the gestural drawings to convey movement of lives. Practice prints could be made on paper made from scrap prints with the best designs becoming a final edition on bean paper. I can print up to A2 on my intaglio press but I plan more achievable A3 prints with the possibility of making myself an A2 paper-making frame which will also need a bigger water bath. Although it maybe possible to splice paper sheets instead, and experimenting is needed here. Initially, I’ll aim for a single A3 print edition, then make another design to see if it can become a series. Blogging will help see it to a conclusion.

Update:

Seven-spot Ladybird

Robin

Genus Winthemia (fly)

experimental dry point prints on handmade papers made from scrap prints, receipts, notepaper, etc. Unsized but compressed twice; blotted on laying with a linen t-towel then run through the printing press when dry. Even without size they are plenty strong enough and highly absorbent, so give a good image on the drypoint tests above using AKUA intaglio ink, which, unfortunately, won’t work well with litho. I need new ink.

Sticky Overwhelm

Overwhelm is fact of life.

Quickly after the architecture of contemporary life is perceived it expands into a fizzing set of constantly connecting and moving matters, an atomic mushroom cloud connecting and infecting everything.

When you try to extract yourself. Come up for air. Come out of your entangled project. Which you have to reluctantly do at some point. You will know the air you breathe is also connected. Full of material and matter. Pollen from farmed plants. Fragments of car tires. Nano-plastics. 

You are connected to this matter by breath. In breathing you imbibe the legacy of all consumption.

If you try to tease that out and think about it, that dismantling will begin to hurt. This stuff is your life. It is you and if you make it a problem, you become a problem too. 

So how do you cope with that?

You contaminate as you are contaminated.
We are all co-contaminees!

And there is a point at which you have to become reconciled with sharing an existence with this stuff.

The reason for making this post is to help myself around this constant problem because the constancy gets a bit too much to handle. And I think I am not the only one who feels this.

Practicing resilience in these times of fast ecological change means there are times when you have to dip in and look at it. Then there are others when you have to let it go and back the hell away. Let your senses take over and just be for a while.

Also, because some of these fizzing connections are yours and yours alone to tug at there's no need to let everyone else become involved all the time.

And also, please don't forget to notice that much of that fizzing connectivity is life being pretty wonderful. 

New Work - Calthemitic Sticky Thinking - Research Tool

Calthemitic Sticky Thinking:
trans-life collaboration with matter as mentor.

Research Poster for MA Contemporary Art & Archaeology Final Project about lithic more-than-human mentorship.

The probably too-teensy text says:

Calthemite, a pseudo-karst also termed ‘urban stalactite’ – ‘grows’ under aged concrete urban architectures.  In response to pollutive airborne particulate found in them, this study investigates calthemite ‘archaeologists of airs’ as creative collaborators and mentors.  Ideas of affective and creepy lithic agency draws on Jane Bennett’s vital materiality1 and Mark Fisher’s interpretation of the uncanny2. The weird and creepy signposted speculative approaches to exploring contemporary archaeologic space by creative art archaeology practice.

Attempts were also made to respond to needs for humility in ecological understanding, navigate different vulnerabilities produced within the trans-life collaboration, and uncover calthemite pasts within urban and cement production landscapes.

The outcome; a deck of 16 awareness cards and a booklet suggests serendipitous prompts can filter research archives and widen human consciousness to lithic being in trans-life collaborations.

 

1.Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.

2.Fisher, M. (2016) The weird and the eerie. London: Repeater Books

 

Images:
Centre: 3D Polycam scan of calthemite on Coventry Canal Basin Footbridge. Background: High res scan of calthemite deposit on a maple leaf. Collected in Coventry, May 2024. Small image: Mentorship meeting. Coventry, March 2025.

  

 

 

Task_Re_negotiation

Cabinets of Renegotiation at East Side Projects, Summer Camp. 

There’s always a bit of nervousness inside curiosity when I hand over a work, but it looked like it would all be ok. Many other submissions had already been hung and the curation was already looking pretty tender and interesting. 

https://eastsideprojects.org/esp/projects/show/

Besides, I had fair confidence in curators Lucy Grubb and Harman Randawa, and art technician Tammy Woodrow who turned out a splendid job of curating my piece. The splendid convergence of yellow lines, which are not part of the work (although they sort of are), are artist/curator co-founder of Eastside Projects, Gavin Wade’s decision to re-stage a Sol LeWitt work throughout the gallery walls. There were also pebbles, just visible in the 2nd photo, arranged throughout the gallery by Lucy Grubb. I felt part of an exposition of scattered harmony.

This version of Cabinets arrives as a kind of kit and a provocation to the curator to take part in a new convergence of objects and humanity. There is a fabric sculpture which is a kind of pillowy representation of the ground that has pockets in it with a wooden dowel that gets screwed into the wall as support. It comes with a wrapped pack of things that I've collected that can stick into the pockets. If I can I try to add something collected on my way to the gallery. They get re-used with this work and another called 'Mapping Sloughing' in a kind of things-go-round sharing deal. 

They mostly come from land around my studio, which is near a train station and a retail park. A mass of indistinct people pass through this space but there is also a grand mass of more stable inhabitants in the shape of plants and trees, and other creatures, birds, rodents and insects, most of whom I haven't met. I won't list everything in the pack as I'm not all that interested in their individual naming, but, for example, there are broken zip ties from deliveries and a variety of organic objects like pine-cones and feathers. Together they are stuffs of lives.

I am interested in their combining and their rearrangement. For this reason, I like serendipity to continue to have a part to play in the work, so I make a point of inviting others into it. On this occasion Tammy appears to have enjoyed fitting in to almost burst as many things as she can. She has made an explosion of stuffs. I think that’s an apt portrait of the ground. However, discord and harmony are both completely acceptable states of being. 

 

Cabinets... is part of a series of similarly titled works inspired by an abiding interest in curiosity cabinets, also called wunderkammer, of the type of polished wooden glazed cabinets displayed inside homes. They were sort of domestically-situated museums, wildly popular with upper-class Europeans of the seventeenth century onwards, in which small objects were displayed to express a curiosity in other cultures, lives and places. Notably the mechanic of display separates the objects from their complex myriad contexts and brings them into new relationships. And, because sometimes these were objects brought back from lands colonised by European countries wunderkammer have become loaded with hugely problematic meanings around hierarchies, extractive geopolitics and racialised attitudes, detail which is far beyond the scope of this short post (Hannah Pethen offers a short survey from a contemporary Egyptologist p.o.v.) However, the expression of control combined with factors of curiosity and invitation to discourse which at the same time de-situates things contains some parallels with our attention to waste, and this attention, or rather inverted-attention interests me. 

It has always confused me that the current wave of humxnity that I live in struggles so much with our unbreakable bond to objects. We don't attend to them. We plainly experience the damage made by things we no longer want to use and still do nothing. We often don’t know what comprises objects. I wonder if, in trying to draw comparisons to this attention attitude we might find clues to how we can do better with the fascinating things we call waste, litter, trash, etc.

Ref: https://hannahpethen.com/2022/08/24/the-modern-wunderkammer-colonial-hangover-or-locus-of-multivocality/

Scale

: definitions

In my current project about calthemite (urban stalactite) in which I zoom in and out perceptively on mineral matter flows associated with chalk and cement, I find I am constantly coming in contact with different meanings of the word 'scale.' Which in the English language is used in wildly different ways and combines linguistic influences from many different peoples from this nation's diversely connected and distant past.

A Google search tells me that from Germanic 'scale' and Old French 'escale' is derived from the look of overlapping scales on a fish. Somewhat the same as flakes of secondary deposit of Calcium Carbonate, also known as Lime, on the surface of a leaf that has been dripped on by calthemites formed underneath a mid-century concrete building.

Inherited from Old Norse is 'scal' (bowl), Dutch Schaal, German 'schale' (bowl), and English 'schal' (dish). Further meaning is created around a pair of scales from ideas revolving around a pair of matched bowls, relating the bowl to the concave shape of a fish scale. From here a notion of balance, measurement and ideas of fair exchange ensue. Origins depart further from the measurement potential of the bowl when the word scale is applied to values, measurement, levels and notation with the idea of progression up, down and across a regularised set of values. 

It is in the use of scale as a verb, 'to scale', that has particular meaning to me, having read Robin Wall Kimmerer's account of her sensitisation to verbs in 'Braiding Sweetgrass', where 'to be bay' transported her into the lithic embrace of a warm breeze-swept beach.

It is where the meaning 'to climb, or clamber up' is found, where scale relates directly to an embodied interaction with the world that transports me. From Old French comes 'escaler' (climb), Medieval Latin 'scalare' (climb) and Latin 'scandere' (to climb). Like Kimmerer, I suddenly feel the knobbly texture of cold, wind-polished, unforgiving stone under my fingers, but this time it is not granular but solid and millimetres from my cheek. I flex my grip and use my legs to push myself up and over a boulder. In this embodied definition it seems that the meaning of scale puts the human body against a backdrop of the whole lithic world and diminishes it in a rather satisfying way.

Ref: Robin Wall Kimmerer 'Braiding Sweetgrass'

Attractor/Repellant sliding scale (circular)

Tuesday 28 May. Afternoon. Searching for pebble fossils on Penally Beach. 

In the straggly line of blue slate, flint and quartz drawn by the turning tide on the beach are blooms of insulation foam. They are the coloured the same yellow as rancid butter. They float in from nobody knows where; boat-yard, holed wall, old car, plumbed leak, bodge-job, loft.

They are hard to touch.  My daughter said, “Yuck.” 

"Hard as stone," I lied. To spite me she hammered away a fragment with her thin blue slate. 

Inside it was pure white. No knowing its age. No tree rings. No knots. No pearls. No doings at all.

Is any growth or gathering of minerals possible here? Can a thing repel all other things? 

I think about the insubstantiality of a flow gathering things within in it. How some things are sticky and some are not. Some things stay open yet others always seem closed. Some traces are plainly obvious and others take a huge amount of time and attention before they can be brought into the open.

So many thoughts have been achieved during my current masters and very little has been shared. I'm still trying to break out of that hermit phase.

 

Exploding day-to-day climate relations

Theorectical Archaeology Group Conference, University of East Anglia (UAE) December 2023.

As usual, and also having become a little hermit-like online over the last year, I'm behind on posting this. But I really wanted to share this fascinating insight into contemporary archaeological enquiry into how objects and matters continually assemble and reassemble. With huge gratefulness to Historic England archaeologist Dr Katy Whittaker, who brought together our small group of artists and archaeologists to Climate TAG in December 2023, by open invitation, asking: 'How did we get here'. We each selected an object associated with our travel to the conference and over several online meetings and one in-real-life morning, picked them apart by exploring (destroyed, observed, discussed) their matter, connections and complexities (which were compound and several), and also got to know each other's perspectives a bit. A fabulous bonus!

Session abstract:

I think it's apt to describe the findings of this small quick project as becoming exponentially more complex as we explored. This contributed to an adaptable and precarious assemblage of things and responses that were overlapping and confusing. A hotch-potch within which some responses were overt and extrovert, and some were very subtle, while others celebrated these differences by weaving the experience together. 

Assemblages of assemblages

Grounding

Thinking about archaeological tropes.