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G R O W H O M E
Mei Sun, Emily Simek
Home exhibition
Wurundjeri Land
Part of the exhibition series ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’ produced with Seventh Gallery, 2024
Grow home is the third exhibition in ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’, a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm, produced with Seventh Gallery.
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.
The exhibition unfolded alongside existent gatherings at a neighbourhood habitat garden, social enterprise urban farm and kindergarten.
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.
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Hot Compost Home Tour is a touring exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb, produced with Seventh Gallery.
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.
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Pictured: Grow home exhibition at urban farm alongside experimental printmaking with produce led by farmers and gardening group, 2024. Photographs 8-9 courtesy of Mei Sun.
Mei Sun, Emily Simek
Home exhibition
Wurundjeri Land
Part of the exhibition series ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’ produced with Seventh Gallery, 2024
Grow home is the third exhibition in ‘Hot Compost Home Tour’, a home-based touring exhibition series curated by artists and gardeners in Naarm, produced with Seventh Gallery.
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.
The exhibition unfolded alongside existent gatherings at a neighbourhood habitat garden, social enterprise urban farm and kindergarten.
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 a touring exhibition series by Emily Simek in collaboration with Merri Cheyne, Anna Dunnill, Eric Jong, Mei Sun and Doug Webb, produced with Seventh Gallery.
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.
———
Pictured: Grow home exhibition at urban farm alongside experimental printmaking with produce led by farmers and gardening group, 2024. Photographs 8-9 courtesy of Mei Sun.