What Stories Make Worlds
Emma Critchley, Feral Practice with Megan Broadmeadow, Hannah Fletcher, Lydia Halcrow and Jem Southam
at Hestercombe Gallery until 23 Feb 2025
Focusing on our relationship with landscape and the environment at a time of climate change and biodiversity collapse, this exhibition charts a journey from the importance of our deep oceans and shorelines, along rivers to local hills and the gardens at Hestercombe. It brings together work by Emma Critchley, Feral Practice with Megan Broadmeadow, Hannah Fletcher, Lydia Halcrow and Jem Southam and includes work from Hestercombe’s own collections, together with a newly commissioned audio play by Stephanie Weston.
Feral Practice draws on artistic, scientific and subjective knowledge practices to expand relationality and cultural connection across species boundaries. They use digital technologies together with analogue processes to foreground creaturely lives and explore the forces of modernity that threaten them. Their new digital commission The Word for Home is Forest is a short fiction film made in collaboration with artist Megan Broadmeadow and students from Pyrland School in Taunton. Countering the narrative that assumes a divide between nature and culture, it presents an alternative vision of the Quantock Hills as home to a group of diverse and hybrid characters for whom the landscape is the wellspring of cultural production, vital for emotional and biological survival.
This exhibition also brings together several important strands of engagement work. As part of the culmination of the SPAEDA/Quantock Landscape Partnership Scheme’s work across the Quantock Hills, Pyrland School have collaborated in the making of Feral Practice’s film work and have had curatorial input into historic works that support the exhibition. Theatre West’s ‘Making an Exhibition of Yourself’ commission supporting young writers in the SouthWest, has, in partnership with Hestercombe, produced ‘Charlotte and Emily’ a newly commissioned audio play by Stephanie Weston inspired by Gertrude Jekyll’s trowel from Hestercombe’s collections.
The title draws inspiration from Donna Haraway's words in her book ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene’ (2016, p.12): “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”
