LAWN PLOT: Visual Arts Center of NJ

Four artists were invited by the Visual Arts Center of NJ in Summit to a summer lab for social practice to discover and harness the bounty of available resources of a place (the Art Center and surrounding land and community). We used the gallery as our studios and the walls to map out our experiments. The public was invited to come in and engage with us and we had the opportunity to share our practices at the local farmers market.

For the residency I worked on two projects. The first started Spring of 2017 when I requested that the art center allow a plot of lawn in their yard be left un-mowed. What grew was an astounding variety of what we call weeds, not to mention a handful of different kinds of grasses . With the help of young students we labelled 30 different plants and revealed that “lawn” is actually a collection of plants. Some plants are native, others foreign invasives, and discussions were generated as to what those terms actually mean. The second project involved harnessing local culture to ferment vegetables.