Last to Bloom, First To Fruit is a mytho-speculative work inspired by the possibility of creating a forest in a Northern post-industrial city. Originally commissioned by Invisible Flock for their exhibition THIS IS A FOREST (as part of Leeds 2023), I developed the work in response to one of 50 proposed sites for a new forest (site #22 Ex Matthew Murray School)
Situated in an alternative reality, the series of photographs, sculptures and writings are presented as artefacts collected by an imagined anthropologist/curator.
The piece contains a series of artifacts collected by an imagined anthropologist/curator taken from the rites of the ‘Murriee Rituals’. In this alternate reality, annual spring harvesting rituals are performed by those living in the land around the ex-Matthew Murray site from 2023 - c2050s who lived, learned and grew alongside the Forest. Watched it bloom and grow. Developed understandings of how to live symbiotically. Amongst those understandings, they developed myths and rituals. And of those myths and rituals, we focus on the Murriee rituals - the central veneration rituals of the Mother Cherry Tree.
In this speculative fiction - the Murries collected the rubble in the 2020s and ceremoniously covered it in the local materials - lime being the main one (possibly moss and mycelium). A practical magic to encourage regrowth and rebirth.