A note on : Filming Worm Wood with Stehlikova, Gibbons, Davidson

Filming again, Tereza Stehlikova and I’s film about disappearing / terraformed West London, and its mysteries, continues to grow, this time in the glowing boil of a heatwave. We were joined with others for this day, which is a rarity. www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood

I’ve been in residence with J&L Gibbons for six years now, that is to say I have built a wonderful friendship with landscape architects Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, and their team, over many years. We meet occasionally and they lay out all their remarkable work for me, bringing me into their processes, their conceptual thinking, their pragmatic practise - their constant efforts to think laterally and liminally with the design and shape of the places we live. They are inspiring people - outgoing, passionate, tireless, considered and considerate. Rarely do I meet people operating at such a high level of effect on the world around us who are never lost within a private professional culture or other personal motivation by the very demands of that work. (Worth checking out their new website too https://jlg-london.com/Practice)

Introducing Tereza and Jo and Neil a few years ago led to some grand moments, most especially in Kensal Green Cemetery and The Garden Museum, so it was natural we would get together to film. We met at Willesden Junction, traced Scrubs Lane down past towering new high rise flats, named Notting Hill Genesis - the beginning of all things. The new development Oold Ooak continues to grow, ebbing over the west lands, clearing space, jutting up into skylines. No Trellick Towers in stone, just rows of glassy plastic flats coming together, built by workers who poured through the lockdown still labouring at risk. Thousands of new homes coming, the HS2 burrowing underneath. Haunts now becoming glossy magazines alive, stuffed full of more people where there is now nearly no one. But us. We joined Wormwood Scrubs at its most northwestern tip, the scrubland as persuasive, quiet, welcoming and atmospheric as ever, before coming back to the grand union canal to finish. It’s a route I must’ve walked 300 times or more. Never with my friends, capturing snippets of conversation, knowing one day the brief connections will be part of the greater whole Tereza and I have been building

A note on: Hosting Landscape Learn : Growth and Decay

A dynamic public facing project from J&L Gibbons, Landscape Learn is an exciting venture that Ive been able to be involved with through my residency and tie into my time at Kensal Green Cemetery, with Tereza Stehlikova, with this event. A one day mix of cemetery tour via geology and lost rivers, to talks on the bones of the city, the urban mind, neuroscience, landscape architecture and finishing with a screening of a film I have small part in, made by Tereza. Tickets were sold to a group of nearly fifty and the day felt really communal and engaged, I met so many really interesting people, all of whom shared a complex and intensive interest in their city and its changing environment - often changing for the worst, as the discussion of the nearby Old Oak Common development seemed never too far from the discussions. It's inspiring for me to work with people such as Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, this is the kind of day that feeds into my work, takes it into new places, where it needs to be, always growing.

A note on: Shifting Ground with J&L Gibbons at Dalston Curve

30 Year Anniversary Event and launching Shifting Ground, a publication - September 22nd 2016: A really wonderful night at Dalston Curve with all the friends, colleagues and members of J&L Gibbons, celebrating three decades of remarkable, innovative, mindful work in shaping the environment of London and beyond. Lovely to work towards this night, where I gave a small contribution with this collective, multivocal reading, through the Shifting Ground publication. A beautiful object, it combines articles, reflections, dialogues, celebrates the past through future work and enterprise, and fortunately for me, contains a suite of my poems. 

The Big Tree Debate at the Garden Museum, London: June 11th 2015

An amazing privilege to publicly evidence my association with J&L Gibbons, I was very kindly asked to read a few poems amidst some wonderful, dynamic talks about Tree heritage and city planning and environment at the Garden Museum in Lambeth. It was a major event, absolutely full, and in the ex-church main hall of the museum. I has the chance to read briefly (which I was delighted to do, briefly) and speak alongside Jo and Tim O'Hare, and vitally, read the poems their work has inspired. It was the most appropriate environment for them, and once done I was able to do what I'd always prefer to do, just listen, and learn from the expertise on display, why people had come and filled out the hall. 

Brita von Schoenaich (Bradley-Hole Schoenaich), and Anne Jazulot (Trees and Design Action Group) spoke too, and the event was chaired by Evan Davis. More info here. I hope this is the first of many events where I share the stage with the people who have so kindly hosted me over the last year, and it only occurs to me in writing this it has been just over a year & a half since I began my conversations with them.

I have also finally built a dedicated webpage for my residency with J&L Gibbons www.stevenjfowler.com/gibbonsresidency where all the work I've done with them is available.

Reading at the Garden Museum - Thursday June 11th 2015

Very excited to be reading at the Garden Museum this week upcoming. The event is a chance for me to read some of the poems I've written during my residence with the amazing landscape architects http://www.jlg-london.com/ called http://thegreenerinfrastructure.tumblr.com/. The work of Jo and the team at J&L Gibbons has been a real inspiration and they published an extraordinary pamphlet entitled Soil last year, the poems from which I will be reading on the night.

Below Ground: a book with J&L Gibbons selected for On Landscape project at Materia Gallery

So pleased to be associated with the amazing landscape architects J&L Gibbons and to be a part of their beautifully produced Below Ground publication was a lovely thing, with my poems on Soil. 

Now to find out that work has been selected for the On Landscape exhibition at the Materia gallery, is a grand and unexpected development. http://www.materiagallery.com/

"Matèria is proud to announce the results of the On Landscape #2 book call. On behalf of the judging panel we would like to thank all the participants; the response and quality of submitted work has been exceptional. After careful deliberation the judges selected 44 books that will be exhibited at Matèria alongside work by Dafna Talmor, Emma Wieslander, Minna Kantonen and Marco Strappato."

landscape architecture residency is going to be amazing

http://www.jlg-london.com/ So proud my residency at the continually inspiring J&L Gibbons landscape archiectects is really growing and taking shape. The work they are doing, and are about to do, is as cutting edge and important and dynamic as I couldve imagined, and Im really privileged to be involved. Do check out their website. 
"Welcome to a group of inspired, energetic and committed landscape architects. For over twenty five years, we have been working with local authorities, developers and community groups to vision and realise beautifully designed “green infrastructure”. We’d like to introduce you to some of our award winning work, and announce that throughout 2014 we will be collaborating with Steven J Fowler, poet in residence at J & L Gibbons."

In 2014, a residency at J & L Gibbons, award winning Landscape Architecture & Urban Design practice

http://www.jlg-london.com/ In the current moment, the space a poet inhabits is without responsibility. That is in language, and whether or not the poet's response to their language world is powerful or flippant, derisive or optimistic, it is all predicated on a space of engagement with the reader which is entirely voluntary, & all the better for that. All the more room for me to seek out alternative spaces, to attach my practice, parasitically, to those creative few who inhabit the alternative, where they are tasked with shaping an environment where people have no choice but to be. A physical space that requires more than physical reckoning. A profound and humbling challenge it must be, to be faced with the responsibility of shaping space that people will inhabit, to need to be both wholly functional and eminently creative. To be mindful for the everyday in people's lives. So I'm beginning a residency with the remarkable landscape architects J &L Gibbons, and hope somehow, over the next year, to respond to their responsiveness, to somehow reflect the necessary complexity of their work, and the inspiring sensitivity and ethics they embody in their work.

 We are all collectively responsible for our space, but there are those of us whose expertise puts them into moments of decision, in real three-dimensional praxis, and whose stake may not be immediate after they have left those environments but whose trace is essential to the feeling and experience of that place. In the urban context, where all, at some point, has been planned or shaped, even if accidentally, by the hands of money, so their role is a fascinating blend of immense power and fundamental invisibility, for the people who will use that space at least, once the architects are gone. This paradox is what attracts me so much to the work of J&L Gibbons and a progressive notion of landscape architecture. For I am, I must admit, quite frequently, unaware of the process of landscape, while being painfully aware of the evolution and environment of language in that very same space. So I believe this residency can be a symbiotic engagement on my part, learning to be mindful of this environmental evolution of the city, especially am ancient city like London, to see with new eyes through the work of Johanna Gibbons and Neil Davidson and their colleagues the changing of environments while tacitly recordings, archiving and reflecting on the language of that process, those spaces and the culture of its happening. 

Like every profession or possession, familiarity breeds diminishing returns in the practitioners understanding of their own responsibility. The grind of unmediated human behaviour undoubtedly leads those who shape our environment to suffer the same prosaic reckoning as any other profession, just as a poet will write the same way for 40 years because he has found some recognition, so the unrewardable complexity of subtle, liminal, 'humane' approaches to the shaping of an environment seems a rare quality that would require great awareness, humility, passion, mindfulness and  ethical self-interrogation. This is my meagre understanding is what defines the work of J & L Gibbons. In fact if I am now able to recognise different fundamental modes of landscape architecture, it is because of my being exposed to their extraordinary work. I had the privilege to speak in person with Johanna Gibbons and Neil Davidson at length about their work, where they fleshed out the content of this talk http://www.gardenmuseum.org.uk/page/grounds-for-optimism-designing-resilient-landscapes-in-london and (perhaps accidentally) exposed me to their remarkable humour, care, sensitivity and engagement with the very root of what they are doing. It so exciting to be in the presence of people at the height of their profession who have never allowed themselves to become lost in the necessary minutia of their task at the expense of the human experience, for all the complexity of that, that underrides their decisions.

I shan't now bring up individual examples of their working history, or their remarkable client list (though its worth looking it up http://www.jlg-london.com as it is all a matter of public record) as I want to save much of it for my work with them over the next year. Suffice to say, in beginning this residency, I am preparing myself for writing that brings with it a responsibility, and that is what I am seeking. Environments are shaped by language as much as anything else, though it hard to reckon, and over the next year I intend to improve my understanding of language in space, in the fundamental shaping of people's living space, and I hope, primarily to permanently refocus my own ability to perceive 3 dimensions and the human presence within then. I am in fine company to do so.