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
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
Images from the Good Life in the East, Gallery Lutnita, Chișinău. Moldova 14-28 Sep 2024
Fragment 2024 - Cordage from Dandelion fibre
Installed at Gallery Lutnita Chișinău Moldova Sep 2024
Dispatch from Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life.
Catherine Morland May 2024. Romania.
Drawing and text published in L'Internationale Online May 2024
https://internationaleonline.org/contributions/dispatch-the-arrow-of-time/
The Arrow of Time.
Many of our meetings take place at the Experimental Research Station for Art and Life, a plot of land being transformed into a sustainable and ecological outdoor garden and project space in Siliștea Snagovului, a village 30 miles north of Bucharest. Our first session took place not long after the commencement of the brutal attacks on Gaza that we still see unfolding now. If we need a reason to embrace non-western technologies for the good life, this global awakening to the complicity of western minds to enable this genocide without question is a good a sign as ever.
The station is introduced to us as a pause, a ground zero, a place to take stock and reflect, where time stands still long enough for us to think about the space between the East and the West. I see it as an active place to think about my inherited positionality and readjust myself accordingly, physically as well as theoretically. As a white Western European-educated woman, I was about to embark on a journey of unlearning. This begins on our bus route from downtown Bucharest where the group were introduced to each other for the first time by describing what we were running away from. I didn't realise that I was.
Inside the perimeter fence of the station stretches a long line of small trees and shrubs, each planted by a different artist. In their new outdoor home these living artworks have agency: they can grow and blossom and flower as they please. Some might not like the soil or light or heat and won’t flourish at all, others might go dormant and reappear next year, others may not. Some may enjoy their new freedom and rampage throughout the plot unchecked, causing hours more labour and intervention. Others still, with juicy new shoots, may succumb to the appetite of local wildlife: foxes, rabbits and deer. Word in the air might get out that the new hedge on the far perimeter is a welcoming habitat with plentiful birdfeeders, and the densest bush will soon be filled with birdsong. As intermittent visitors to the station we witness these ongoing temporal changes from early winter 2023 to late spring 2024. The hard labour takes place in our absence: non-living artworks are installed as well as a cooking station, a compost toilet and a phyto-filtration system. Plans are being drawn up for a two-storey living space. Regular visitors to the station activate the space and bring new iterations and ideas.
Artworks in standard modern art collections around the world are rarely given the same treatment. We discussed this in our March meeting with curator Charles Esche, who was visiting from Eindhoven. He spoke about his role in the reinvention of the Van Abbemuseum by demoderning the art collection through decolonial thinking. The ubiquitous white cube is designed to exclude so much. As soon as an art work is installed, its former life is extinguished, like a butterfly succumbed to chloroform. The context for its existence is often erased with as little evidence as possible of its former life, thus enabling its new position in an aesthetic vacuum. This vacuum is fairly exclusive, as Esche explains, and inhospitable to people who do not easily fit into its criteria. His vision for a demodern art collection is in 'reconnecting it to people and histories that it has excluded for too long.'[1]
This brings to mind Grace Nduritu, the British/Kenyan artist who goes further with this line of thinking by reflecting on the mental state of artworks in her work 'Healing the Museum’ https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/Y2zToBAAAB4AKgRn
She talks about the responsibility of museums to look after the welfare of the museum objects, some of whom, in her view, are unhappy and were never meant to be seen by a ‘single ray of sunlight or looked at by millions of keen museum-goers. Hence, they feel like they are being robbed of their agency, with no rights of their own. As such, they want to be free.’ [2]
Of the Kaiget Totem Poles in the musee quai Branly in Paris Ndurito says: ‘They want to stand tall outside, feeling the sun on their surfaces, allowing rain to penetrate them and to fulfil the purpose for which they were created; they want their lives and their souls back.’[3] Like Esche, she believes a powerful change can happen in our awareness of art objects and our relationships with them
The group is returning to Siliștea Snagovului this week. It will be our last visit. For me there is a sense that the linear arrow of time – launched from the deep past, hovering momentarily here in the present before hurtling headlong to the future – has hesitated, like the fluctuating oscillations of a broken grandfather clock. Whilst contemplating the happenings and provocations on this small plot of land, the arrow is perhaps in flux and drawn to change its course, maybe to turn back on itself, or loop the loop in a continuous cycle, inviting us to think about the rhythmic pendulum of circular time and its interconnectedness with nature as an alternative way of being, and asking us ultimately to unlearn and consider a different perspective.
[1] Charles Esche, Why the “modern” in Modern Art fails us now
[2] Grace Ndiritu, ‘Healing the Museum’ A New Museum Story for Planet Earth
https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/Y2zToBAAAB4AKgRn
[3] Grace Ndiritu, ‘Healing the Museum’ A New Museum Story for Planet Earthhttps://internationaleonline.org/contributions/dispatch-the-arrow-of-time/
Wasteless 2 Way Out East Gallery
22 April - 28 April 2024
Wasteless 2 will be showing experimental material projects alongside a selected group of artists who share an interest in using materials - be they found, foraged or recycled - to explore approaches to history, craft traditions, storytelling, interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Some contributors source their own pigments/plant colours and explore the process of their production through storytelling, performance and installation. Others excavate unexpected connections between materials and place by combining digital technology with craft traditions.The exhibition also highlights activities coming out of the workshops including the continuing development of the natural dye garden, the Guerrilla garden, new material experiments and student projects that have engaged with these new possibilities of sustainable processes.
Exhibitors:Catherine Morland, Sara Trillo, Lucy Mayes,
Marissa Stoffer, Original Copy, Marie Louise Jones, Jamie Limond, Mark Sowden, Sharon Drew, Melanie Crolla, Paul Nichols, Joanne Primiano, Row Seward, Zoe Hodgson.
Also featuring projects by L4 Fashion design,
Unit_h_UEL architecture and dfUEL
This short project brings artists and work from a project about the ‘commons’ undertaken at the Museum of English Rural Life, in Reading, UK between 2020 to 2022. The idea of ‘the commons’ has a particular history in England, and areas of British colonialism, such as Australia and the United States. Originally referring to land which ‘commoners’ were allowed to use in restricted ways, e.g. for grazing and gathering firewood, it has more recently become a political concept used to protest the appropriation of natural resources for private exploitation. Re-situating this project in the Swedish context opens up other histories and practices of commoning. On the Saturday 26th of August 2023 Celsius projects invited the public to explore these ideas further through with Performing the Commons with performances by Francis Brady, Sigrid Holmwood and Catherine Morland.
June 22-25th 2023
Wellcome Collection
"While in the forest, which we call our ancestral home/
land, we had the liberty to access anything we wanted
for free, like collecting wild honey, feeding on wild
meat, wild Yams and fruits and accessing herbal
medicine whenever someone would get sick."
' - Sylvia Kokunda
On 23 June, 2-3pm, we will run the workshop "Weaving
Land and Health". Audiences are invited to join artists
and weavers @catmorland, @sheilaghelani and
@sylviakokunda (@abeg_uganda) to weave using
raffia, grass and other materials. Together we will
consider where the materials for these cultural
practices come from, and in what ways we are rock,
soil, water or air.
To see the full festival programme and book your
tickets (free) for this and other events, visit the
@WellcomeCollection website
Wellcome Collection
"While in the forest, which we call our ancestral home/
land, we had the liberty to access anything we wanted
for free, like collecting wild honey, feeding on wild
meat, wild Yams and fruits and accessing herbal
medicine whenever someone would get sick."
' - Sylvia Kokunda
On 23 June, 2-3pm, we will run the workshop "Weaving
Land and Health". Audiences are invited to join artists
and weavers @catmorland, @sheilaghelani and
@sylviakokunda (@abeg_uganda) to weave using
raffia, grass and other materials. Together we will
consider where the materials for these cultural
practices come from, and in what ways we are rock,
soil, water or air.
To see the full festival programme and book your
tickets (free) for this and other events, visit the
@WellcomeCollection website
The Commons: Re-Enchanting the World, edited by C. Morland and & A. Couch, designed by K. Fraser (2022) Purchase the Publication
THE COMMONS: RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD
SIX ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE COMMONS at THE MUSEUM OF ENGLISH RURAL LIFE IN READING
JAN 2020- APRIL 2022
CURATED BY CATHERINE MORLAND AND AMANDA COUCH
SIX ARTISTS RESPOND TO THE COMMONS at THE MUSEUM OF ENGLISH RURAL LIFE IN READING
JAN 2020- APRIL 2022
CURATED BY CATHERINE MORLAND AND AMANDA COUCH
THE COMMONS: RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD A NEW INSTALLATION IN THE MERL GALLERIES…
The commons defines the natural capital that we all share: land, air, and water. It is a reciprocal social system that cares for and preserves these resources. It relies on relationships of shared knowledge and creativity, which bind us together with more-than-human processes, forces, and resources.
When the commons are enclosed, eroded, or made inaccessible, the effects are devastating. It leads to grave ecological changes and brings about the decline of communal life and subsistence living. In turn, this can impact environment, lifestyle, labour, gender rights, and the wage economy. Rural histories of enclosure provide a link between the commons and The MERL. Private ownership played a critical role in early capitalism and colonial expansion. Damage stemming from these processes has radiated around the world and into our future.
Six artists with responses to the commons have made installations for the Museum’s galleries. For them, this concept should not be confused with a simple or binary understanding of the links between humans and nature. Propelled into different areas of research, discussion, and collaboration, their diverse interpretations explore the notion that the commons is active and living, not a passive resource to be managed. They focus on how the many social and ecological challenges we now face link back to complex histories of ownership and enclosure.
The Commons: Re-Enchanting the World online exhibition provides a guide to the artworks you will see on display as you visit the galleries.MEET THE ARTISTSSigrid Holmwood expands painting by following the colonial histories of the plants she uses to make her pigments and dyes. She plays with the contrast between images of peasants used to construct national romanticisms, and paintings by peasants using hybrid mixtures of local, imported, and migrated plant life. Thereby, highlighting the entangled histories between the rural European proletariat and colonised indigenous peoples.
Catherine Morland is interested in plant based crafts from a feminist perspective. For this project she has researched traditional skills usually associated with women’s work to foreground the detrimental effect enclosures have on reproductive labour. Using weaving, basketry, knots and cordage she has made three installation pieces and a group of vessels for display in the Museum’s galleries.
Kelechi Anucha and Carl Gent first met as plot-holders on an allotment in New Cross, SE London. Since 2020, they have been looking at and working with English folk music, its relationship to church song, its slippery place within the English imaginary and its subversive potential as a sonic commons. Utilising a very personal collection of technology and instrumentation, they have recorded new renditions of a range of folk songs hosted inside different sculptures and installations exhibited at the MERL and Wysing Arts Centre during 2021.
Amanda Couch researches, reinterprets and reimagines histories, myth, ritual and embodied knowledge. Becoming with Wheat (and Other More-Than-Human Others) explores this interspecies kinship: a collective or commons that embodies the idea that we are all in relation, interdependent and interconnected. Along with ‘Becoming with Wheat Companions’, she is cultivating wheat in The MERL gardens and will exhibit films, anthotypes and sculptural masks.
The Commons: Re-Enchanting the World project is generously funded by Arts Council England and the University for the Creative Arts and took place at The MERL, from Jan 2020 to April 2022, with installations and interventions in The MERL galleries and gardens, a virtual launch event in July, in-person events in the autumn term, and workshops and a symposium in January 2022. Please note that the installation has been extended as the workshops and symposium were postponed due to COVID. Please visit the What’s On page to see find the new dates and to book
Wheat and Rush, Weave and Ritual
16 October 2018 The Museum of English Rural Life. Reading.
Artwork/Housework
28th September - 1st October 2017
Reproductive labour (work performed within the domestic sphere to sustain a household; cleaning, cooking, childcare, raising the next generation, and looking after the elderly) is the starting point for this exhibition. Housework is time consuming, uncompensated and not generally recognised as work. Repetitive and endless it can be viewed as an obstacle to creativity. Politically speaking it can be seen in a similar way to artistic work: neither is economically valued and both remain outside the social framework of value-labour. For this exhibition artists were asked to respond to the theme of Housework/Artwork. The everyday material reality of reproductive labour will be presented and exhibited as art. Throughout the weekend there will be demonstrations, performances, and hands on workshops. The aim is to create a space for art and social engagement within the domestic sphere of a South East London home.
CuratorsSarah Gillham, Mindy Lee, Catherine Morland
CuratorsSarah Gillham, Mindy Lee, Catherine Morland