Artist-led building: farming organic knowing

ABSTRACT

This article presents a writing collaboration between an ethnographer and two artists. It was developed from a one-week residency at Kultivator, which is an artist-led project situated on an organic farm on the Swedish island of Öland. The writing is informed by classical pragmatist philosophy and gives focus to the organic trope of human-environment continuity. Drawing on the writing experiment the article argues that Kultivator is not simply doing organic farming; but building a farm to think-with organically. Kultivator is presented as a way of knowing continuity; and a way of doing organic philosophy also. As such the article suggests this artist-led practice has capacity to stretch artistic practice and its discourse beyond human collaboration. The research contributes an experiential account of artist-led practice in a rural context. Rather than focusing on artworks or ‘buildings’ this collaboration asks us to consider the way we ‘build’ our participatory process of living together and the role artistic knowledge can have in doing so.

KEYWORDS:

• Artistic knowledge
• artist-led practice
• trans-action
• worlding
• classical pragmatism
• John Dewey

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julie Crawshaw is Senior Lecturer in Arts at Northumbria University. She has an interdisciplinary research practice that is informed by her undergraduate in Fine Art, MSc in Development Studies and PhD in Planning and Landscape. Before joining Northumbria she held research posts at Newcastle University and Gothenburg University and prior to that she worked in the UK visual arts sector with focus on artist-led and community oriented practice.

Additional information

Funding

This fieldwork was funded by the Swedish Research Council as part of ‘Stretched: Expanding Notions of Artistic Practice through Artist-led Cultures’. The Stable (A Collaborative Story) was supported by the Research Board at Valand Academy and designed by Kjell Caminha.