We are a network of interdisciplinary artists based in Guernsey and London. For this project, we will display a series of site-responsive works (including performance, installation, sculpture, film, sound art, poetry and spoken word) at the old Northbrook Nursery in the north of Guernsey between 1st and 30th September 2018.

 

All that remains today of the once thriving nursery, run by David Falla and his family, is an empty field where four greenhouses used to stand, now full of pampas grass, wild flowers and weeds. Shards of glass, concrete slabs, empty pots, torn seed packets and the remains of the old irrigation system litter the site, which is also home to a dilapidated barn and Falla’s old office, a jumbled and fascinating archive of his work and life. As well as being the largest tomato seedling seller to growers in the island, he was also an altruist, an ardent Methodist and ran a lively youth club, for which he was awarded an MBE.

 

Participating individuals include Guernsey-based artists Jean-Christophe Godet, Maryjane Orley, Mark Parry, Suzette Pedersen, Martin Purvis, and Adam Stephens as well as London-based artists Matthew Fink, Christopher Heighes, Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley and P.A. Skantze. The 12 to 15 works  that the group will produce, on their own and in collaboration with each other, will celebrate different facets of Guernsey’s growing industry as well as details of the island’s natural and cultural landscape. The works will explore, in different ways, what the vanished greenhouses might have represented over the years:  spaces of work and of refuge but also spaces apart, protected from the weather, the wild, and the uncultivated; spaces that could thrive out of season.