Page 14 - ALG Issue 2 2025

CREATIVE PLOTTER
CANVAS BURIAL PROJECT
– KINSHIP TO LAND
Kim Norton, Stuart Road Allotment Artist Residency April –
September 2024
In 2024 Kim Norton was invited to
undertake the second artist in residence
at Stuart Road allotments in Nunhead,
Southeast London. Nestled among houses
and backing onto a cemetery, the site has
been home to the allotments for 100 years.
‘Kinship to Land’ was a project undertaken
as part of Kim’s expanded public
engagement programme, in collaboration
with the plotholders during the residency.
The aim of ‘Kinship to Land’ was to gather
and document as many plots across the
allotment to see how different gardening
methods, such as crop rotation, composting,
and soil improvers, affected the loam.
Small packages of canvas and calico were
given out to anyone wanting to participate
with the following instructions:
Bury the two pieces of fabric on your plot
and leave in the ground for four weeks.
You can simply bury the swatches as
they are or fold them, tie them, or add other
materials on to them – any way you want.
You can bury them in different locations on
your plot or place them together.
I’d recommend you bury them approx.
20-30cm deep and mark the location.
Please make simple notes logging
where you’ve buried them, particularly
noting what has been growing within that
patch of soil.
After four weeks dig them up and
return them to me.
Don’t be alarmed if the fabric is
disintegrating – that’s a sure sign you have
lots of healthy activity within your soil.
This simple process measures the health of
the soil and microbe activity.
The swatches were returned to Kim, with
a series of hand written notes outlining
where and how they had been buried and
how the plotholders tend their soil.
This collaborative work directly relates to
growing your own food and tending the soil,
and provides a visual marker on the health
of a small patch of land that each person
manages with such care and individuality.
Half of the swatches were exhibited
at the Lethaby Gallery in London in
December 2024 – January 2025. The other
half was displayed at London's Somerset
House in their landmark exhibition Soil: The
World at our feet during April.
This originally derived from an ongoing
project called ‘Soil Dialogues’, led by Eco
Art Space in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of
which Kim is a participating member. For
this, Kim buried four pieces of canvas and
calico on her plot in November-December
2023. These were presented at a soil
conference and exhibition in Dialoghi del
Suolo at II Conventino in Florence, Italy.
To expand on this for her residency, Kim
aimed to explore the results across the
entire allotment site and to bring people
together in an understanding that how they
treat their soil has a direct impact on their
crops.
One immediate observation was that
the two people that returned the most
degraded fabric fragments were both
professional gardeners – Steve Sheppard on
plot 144 and Jane Booth on plot 113.
14 | Issue 2 2025 | Allotment and Leisure Gardener