Five years ago, as I turned 30, I began to understand the bouts of depression and anxiety that had ravaged my mental health for the preceding decade. It wasn’t only triggered by the unexpected convergence of traumas that accompany emotional development. The feelings of hopelessness and helplessness brought on by existing in a finite world that demands infinite growth contributed, too. Ever since I have been challenging the narrow expectations by which having an arts practice is held in dominant culture, particularly aesthetic choices, materials used and dissemination techniques.
In changing my methodology rather than setting goals, I have hacked my own internal reward system to celebrate abundances that appear in the everyday: wild food, commercial surpluses, domestic plenty, art production leftovers. I don’t think about my work as ‘zero-waste’, ‘eco-friendly’ or even ‘sustainable’ because these terms are oversimplified and vague. I start from a position of wanting to improve rather than sustain the current situation. Instead, I use deep and prolonged observation of built environments and local greenspaces to tune into organic rhythms, notice energy flows, create connections with (more-than) humans. This living practice is a direct response to the unstable world we inhabit, a form of resistance to apparatus of control, a way to act with intention and acknowledge my sphere of influence.
I have not bought conventional art materials since school. It’s either a humble-brag or an admission of sustained financial insecurity depending on which way you look at it. Everything I have used has been either found, donated, bought second-hand, swapped, or stolen. Originally this was for lack of funds, then a stylistic endeavour to test my creativity with restrictions. But, for a long time now I’ve been committed to low carbon methodologies. I do this through cutting the use of materials that use fossil fuels in their production, transportation or distribution.
It has become important to look critically at the life cycles of materials that often just ‘appear’ in my world and just as easily disappear. Where do they arrive from? Via who? What happens once they are no longer useful? One key way to reframe this has been to broaden the definition of what constitutes an art material. Another has been to bring difficult questions to the forefront of my writing. These discuss accountability and encourage more thoughtful co-existence with (in)animate beings.
Except for an off-grid solar system which I can reinstall on a future house, I bought nothing at all for my exhibition ‘The Beans’ at Two Queens in Leicester. I borrowed most of what I needed from a farm, collected disused windows, brought in some fermentation experiments from home, asked family and friends to post seeds, made my own compost, and cut up the old gallery staircase for timber. Once it ended, I donated the built furniture to a community garden, dropped the farm’s loans back and returned home with my ferments and solar set-up. The rest of the debris has since been turned into microbe-rich soil by the bath-tub full of worms that featured in the show. The most pressing matter in my work right now is to learn how to better break down existing matter. The ambition is for myself to become a decomposer like the worms, woodlice, and mycorrhizal network I rely on.
I asked in an essay I wrote last year called ‘Vague Decay Now’, commissioned for Dani Admiss’ excellent project Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline, “Why does art need to exist indefinitely when we don’t have a forever secured?”. And I am consistently trying to answer my own question with unwavering clarity – it doesn’t! With a very basic framework, I can ensure all my materials and everything I fabricate can either be eaten, repurposed or composted. There’s no one right way to responsibly alter a practice to reduce its ecological impact. As there’s no predetermined pathway for a post-capitalist future. The climate crisis is forcing artists to drastically rethink their most instinctive activities, which will inevitably lead to difficult realisations, interesting discourse and experimental outcomes. It must be the highest priority to commit to regenerative thinking.
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Sean Roy Parker is a writer, gardener and visual artist based at The Field, an experimental residency and co-living project near Ilkeston, Derbyshire. He practises slow, low-tech crafts and food preservation with consumer waste and natural abundances, and shares extensively through labour exchange, favours and artswaps. Under the moniker Fermental Health he writes about and leads workshops on material lifecycles, interspecies responsibility, and collaborative problem-solving. He is patiently anticipating the post-capitalist transition through the lens of land access and food justice.
His writing features in WeedsFeed by Publics, Helsinki (Finland), Tender Order by Jade Monserrat (UK), and Worry, Collect, Fold by Kunstverein Luneburg (Germany). He has delivered public projects on fermenting with microbes for Liverpool Biennial (UK), anarchist and farmer solidarity in Valencia at Pols (Spain), and solo presentation ‘The Beans’ at Two Queens, Leicester (UK). Roy is a Wysing Arts Centre Resident 2023-24, and editing his first poetry collection with Monitor Books, due next spring.
This work has a