Emily Simek, Mei Sun
Grow home
12
September 2024
12
Sep
2024
6
Oct 2024
Home exhibition, Wurundjeri Land
Grow home
Emily Simek, Mei Sun
12
September 2024
12
September
2024
6
October 2024
Home exhibition, Wurundjeri Land
Grow home is part of ‘Hot Compost Home Tour,’ a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm. Curated by Mei Sun and her child, ‘Grow home’ is a roving exhibition that draws on the creativity of migrant culture to make a home with a young child in uncertain times.
After years of roaming internationally, we set up a base in Naarm. We came with a curiosity to deepen our understanding of where we live through First Nations initiatives; through the local ecology and community. Home grew to be wherever my toddler and I could be planting, tending, weeding, un/learning together, hands in the soil, with the microbes, the fungi, the minibeasts, our fellow growers, and the chatter over morning tea.
For ‘Grow home’, we will be weeding and planting alongside a quilt made by Emily Simek that uses fabrics dyed with homegrown and foraged plants, recalling a time when everyday textiles were made locally and told the stories of place, plants and culture. We will be at a social enterprise urban farm and a neighbourhood habitat garden. There will also be a private exhibition with a children’s group. At each site, after tending to the plants, we will come together for the ritual cuppa. There will be worm tea for the plant locals and a chance to see if we can listen underground to our minibeast neighbours via a contact microphone and headphones.
———
Hot Compost Home Tour is an off-site exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb. The home-based tour explores composting as an approach to exhibition practice. Using relational ethics as a framework, the project considers the conditions of the various exchanges that ‘create’ compost: how and where does it come to exist? How are different collaborators implicated? Instead of a purely material process, composting becomes about the work of relationships within systems of exchange.
This project is supported by a VCA50 Creative Development Grant, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
Image courtesy of Mei Sun, 2024.
Grow home is part of ‘Hot Compost Home Tour,’ a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm. Curated by Mei Sun and her child, ‘Grow home’ is a roving exhibition that draws on the creativity of migrant culture to make a home with a young child in uncertain times.
After years of roaming internationally, we set up a base in Naarm. We came with a curiosity to deepen our understanding of where we live through First Nations initiatives; through the local ecology and community. Home grew to be wherever my toddler and I could be planting, tending, weeding, un/learning together, hands in the soil, with the microbes, the fungi, the minibeasts, our fellow growers, and the chatter over morning tea.
For ‘Grow home’, we will be weeding and planting alongside a quilt made by Emily Simek that uses fabrics dyed with homegrown and foraged plants, recalling a time when everyday textiles were made locally and told the stories of place, plants and culture. We will be at a social enterprise urban farm and a neighbourhood habitat garden. There will also be a private exhibition with a children’s group. At each site, after tending to the plants, we will come together for the ritual cuppa. There will be worm tea for the plant locals and a chance to see if we can listen underground to our minibeast neighbours via a contact microphone and headphones.
———
Hot Compost Home Tour is an off-site exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb. The home-based tour explores composting as an approach to exhibition practice. Using relational ethics as a framework, the project considers the conditions of the various exchanges that ‘create’ compost: how and where does it come to exist? How are different collaborators implicated? Instead of a purely material process, composting becomes about the work of relationships within systems of exchange.
This project is supported by a VCA50 Creative Development Grant, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
Image courtesy of Mei Sun, 2024.
Emily Simek
Emily Simek uses a practice in digital art, textiles, installation, writing and gardening to explore the conditions that sustain ecologies. Her practice explores relationships within food webs, and intersects with community gardening and social practices. She is a caretaker of a worm farm compost system, and contributor to Patch-Work, a collaborative project on Wurundjeri Land at Joe’s Market Garden, Coburg.
Mei Sun
Mei Sun is an interaction designer and documenter. Her design work, previously in software, is now focused on ecological systems. With a local community group, she tends to a public habitat garden, re-introducing grasslands species that were present at the site prior to colonisation. Her work in documenting ranges from radio documentaries for ABC Radio National to exploring her grandmother’s 100 year old traditional Tibetan apron and its relationship to plants.