Exhibition and programme of events curated by Catherine Morland in collaboration with Bosse and Baum Gallery.Part of Illuminate a 10 day celebration to mark the end of the National Lottery Heritage fund project designed to conserve the Cemetery's magnificent landscape and architeeture:

St Stephen's Chapel, West Norwood Cemetery,London SE27 OBS

The exhibition Gathering the Commons brings together a group of artists whose practices explore the intricate relationships between humans, non-humans, landscapes, and natural materials. Artworks by four artists – Lucy Mayes, Catherine Morland, Marissa Stoffer, and Sara Trillo – are exhibited in St Stephen’s Chapel, West Norwood Cemetery. A series of talks, events, and walks will accompany the exhibition on 7 & 8 June 2025
 
The exhibition delves into ecological histories, human–plant relationships, sustainable making, and the social significance of handmade traditions. The artists’ diverse approaches include performative walks uncovering landscape histories, pigment creation from urban waste and wild plants, cordage and basketry techniques rooted in traditional knowledge, and installations that speak to the symbiotic relationships between humans and their environments. By focusing on slow, intentional craft practices and deep material research, these artists challenge contemporary disconnections, offering sensory experiences that reconnect us with the living systems that sustain us.
 
The artists draw on the location of West Norwood Cemetery, particularly its unique ecological features and rich biodiversity shaped by its geology, hydrology, and landscaping. As one of London’s “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries, this historic site was built on the remnants of the Great North Wood, which once stretched for seven miles from Croydon to the River Thames at Deptford. Most of this ancient oak woodland – and the commons surrounding it – was engulfed by urban expansion and the practice of enclosure in the 19th century. Some vestiges of this natural heritage remain visible today. Through their installations and events, the artists aim to engage local communities while highlighting the cemetery’s rich biodiversity and cultural legacy – including its role as a haven for wildlife and its historical significance as a Victorian-era garden cemetery.
 
Lucy Mayes is an artist, pigment maker, and educator based in London. Working under the name London Pigment, she uses materials from urban waste streams to create recycled pigments for creative practitioners. By sourcing pigments from geographically specific materials, she seeks to unearth hidden stories and forge connections between humans and non-humans. Through her pigment-making process, Mayes has developed a close relationship with the cemetery’s oak trees – Pin, English, and Holm – engaging with them not just as trees, but as material collaborators. Their wood, galls, ash, and tannins became agents of transformation, enabling sensory, chemical, and visual engagement.
 
Her installation, Transmuting The Oak: An Ode to Quercus robur (2025), uses reclaimed English oak – sourced as waste from a cabinetmaker – to create a spectrum of natural pigments. The oak, symbolising strength and endurance, was selected for its chemical properties that enhance and stabilise natural dyes. In the accompanying series of small vessels, Breath of the Earth (returning) (2025), the pigments are only temporarily bound to their surfaces. These works, reminiscent of funerary urns and displayed on a funerary bier, reflect on memory, fragility, and the impossibility of true preservation. Here, colour is not just seen – it is remembered, mourned, and continually transformed. This piece forms part of Mayes’ broader artistic and research practice, where the relationship between material and meaning is constantly explored.
 
Catherine Morland is a London-based artist and gardener whose work bridges art and horticulture. She explores the use of plants and plant fibres through traditional techniques such as basketry, weaving, cordage, and knotting, focusing on the social and cultural significance of handmade crafts. Her practice emphasises the ecological and historical value of processes once considered essential but later relegated to “craft”. Viewing basketwork as a form of commons, she fosters a reciprocal relationship with nature by understanding plant life cycles and habitats, promoting sustainability, care, and skill.
 
Morland’s collection of vessels, Basket is in the Roots, That’s Where it Begins (2025), made from dried grasses and other plants found in the cemetery, are shaped like urns or totems. Alongside these are two installations – Between Worlds (2025) and Pioneer Taraxacum (2025) – made using cordage from dandelions growing near the chapel. The works draw on Victorian symbolism found throughout the cemetery, as well as the concept of “thin spaces” in folklore – liminal zones between worlds. The artist references veiled urns carved from stone, scattered among the graves, which symbolise the boundary between life and death. She also considers the site as a living, breathing, regenerative space, where self-seeding wildflowers, moss-covered stones, and ancient trees have created wildlife corridors between the headstones. This overgrown quality is not decay in the pejorative sense, but compost – an active, generative state where endings become beginnings. Her work continues a broader enquiry into the idea of the commons: how histories of land, labour, and enclosure shape our relationship with nature. In this context, the cemetery becomes not only a memorial landscape but a site of resistance to extractive systems – a space where we might reconcile ourselves with our place within nature’s cycles, rather than apart from them.
 
Marissa Stoffer is a cross-disciplinary artist and educator whose practice explores ecology, plants, and humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world. Rooted in slow craft and foraging, she creates natural dyes and pigments from plants collected on walks, combining scientific inquiry with botanical colour-making. Her work spans textiles, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and performance, and often draws on esoteric philosophy, myth, and animism to explore trees as central figures of identity and connection.
 
Her immersive processes and deep engagement with place help uncover the stories, metaphors, and cosmologies embedded in plant life. Materials, methods, and themes are shaped by the seasons, local ecologies, stories, science, and sustainability, to inspire a sense of kinship, wonder, and awe for the more-than-human world.
Stoffer’s work in the exhibition, Duir (2025) – the ancient Celtic word for “oak” – is installed in a doorway of the chapel, suggesting a gateway. The artist foraged oak leaves from cemetery trees and used them as dye for a textile cut and pinched to form patterns reminiscent of tree bark. She explores our complex relationship
​​