For this intimate salon we visited Elisa de Grey’s allotment to talk about her practice. Framing the allotment as artist studio we talked about her interdisciplinary practice with the land, as a theatre practitioner and yoga/meditation teacher.
The group gathered included Artists Marita Fraser, Nic Chalmers, Amanda Butterworth and Matt Spendlove. The discussion opened up wider questions around our relationship to the natural world, listening practices, embodied ways of knowing, climate change and the tensions of existing in a late capitalist society.
For our conversation we sat in Springfield park overlooking Elisa’s allotment. The recording was captured with a Reynolds A-Type 4, 1st order ambisonic microphone and has been rendered binaurally for this podcast, listening with headphones is recommended. The recording captures the interwoven sounds of the natural world and city life on a Monday morning mid-July. Parakeets and aeroplanes soaring overhead, bees buzzing around the microphone, distant trains traversing the marshes, plant life rustling in the breeze, the sounds of up-all-night ravers and the calls of a song thrush.
Elisa has put together a reading list for a deeper look into some of her research:
The Living Mountain – Nan Shepherd
The One-Straw Revolution – Masanobu Fukuoka
Modern Nature – Derek Jarman
Wilding –Isabella Tree
Maria Thun’s Biodynamic Calendar
The poems of John Clare
Anything written by Alys Fowler, Beth Chatto, Martin Crawford and Robert Macfarlane.
Online:
This is a contemplation, On Nature, recorded by Elisa for her online yoga and meditation classes, an extraordinarily rich library of audio only classes.
The podcast features original music, by Amanda Butterworth and Matt Spendlove.
All audio recording, mixing and production by Amanda Butterworth.
