“This project has been about looking to nature for all the useful things it can give to an artist - colour, materials, and inspiration! We have grown plants and experimented with different materials to make glue and colour. We have thought about where to source things from, how we would like to use them, and where they should go when we are done with them - trying to minimize waste. By using natural materials they have been safe to touch with our hands, and feed to the worms when we are finished with them. Sometimes our experiments have felt successful and sometimes they have been challenging. For example, some plants thrived and some died. It’s ok! We looked after them, enjoyed them, used their flowers to make colours, and put their branches in the compost - making a full cycle.

このプロジェクトでは、アーティストに「色」や、「そざい」や、「アイディア」をくれる「自然」についてみてきました。私たちは、いくつかのしょくぶつを育てて、それを「のり」や「えのぐ」にするじっけんを重ねてきました。このじっけんでは、「そざい」をどこから手に入れて、どうやって使い、使い終わったらどうするのか、ということについて、いつも考えていました。そしてできるだけ「ごみ」を出さないようにしました。自然のものは、手でふれても安全で、使い終わったら虫やびせいぶつが食べてまた土にかえしてくれます。じっけんは、成功することもあったし、かべにぶつかることもありました。たとえば、おなじしょくぶつを育てても、元気にそだつものも、かれてしまうものもありました。でもそれは自然なことです。私たちが水をあげてお世話をしてもかれてしまったら、花は「えのぐ」に生まれかわり、葉っぱやくきは、ミミズが食べて土にかえしてくれます。これはかんぜんな自然の「じゅんかん」です。”

— Introduction to the Material Garden Adventure Journal「マテリアル・ガーデン」について

After a successful one-month pilot run of the Studio Nextdoor Project, the team at Toride Art Project was invited back for the whole summer semester at Sanno Elementary School in Ibaraki - and took me back with them!. This time around, and afforded a great deal of freedom, I was keen to pull in the research from my ongoing projects; our documentary on the material culture of plastic, PLASTIC LOVE! by striving for minimal waste and closed-loop material cycles, and SOLASTALIGIA’s emphasis on walking and a sensory connection with the natural world.

The result was a 3-month project working with students aged 6 to 11, called ‘Material Garden’ With the brave permission of the school and City Office, we (me + the ever amazing TAP superstars Habara-San and Yuko-San, with support from a host of other phenomenal folks, noted below) transformed the classroom at Sanno into a lively greenhouse where we grew and observed the plants that provided us with art materials, making artworks in response to them and using the materials in a variety of ways that paid close attention to the amazing gifts of nature.

As most of our materials were kid-safe (essentially, edible), this meant we could throw ourselves into making messy artworks - and at the end of the day gather up any scraps that weren’t going to be reused and feed them to our worms.

Here are the Adventure Sheets I made and we followed along each week. Each one encouraged the students to cast a curious eye over some element of art and environment. Better still were the days they strolled in unaccompanied and followed their own lines of inquiry - and just kicked back and enjoyed the space! We tried to respect their autonomy, and follow their lead when invited.

Our activities focused on some common materials that come straight from the fields, like rice, wheat, and corn (all great glues with variable properties) that we tested out with flowers, plant fibers, and recycled paper clays), flowers and veggies (that provided our pigments), pollinator insects like butterflies and bees, and soil superheroes like microbes, mushrooms, and worms.

We got rid of our rubbish bins (the room came with ‘burnable’ and ‘non-burnable’ cans, the contents of both likely to end up incinerated) and instead endlessly repurposed materials - and it was so heartening to see how quickly the students went from throwing things ‘away’ to thinking of ways to reuse, and joyfully plunging scraps into the wormery to rot - providing more soil for our next seed-sowing. Indeed, when the mayor came to visit the students were elbow deep in a very wriggly, wormy compost - I was delighted and it made him laugh ‘til he cried. Let’s hope that translates to more schools coming with compost heaps in the near future!