With her sound walk Weeds are Community, Lúcia Harley created an invitation to look closer at the organic fabric around us through weeds: plants you might overlook every day as they seek sanctuary in walls, reach up from drains and push through cracks in the pavement.
This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2024.
Below, Lúcia reflects on her work.
This project started as a conversation with my dad, a botanist from The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, along the overgrown bank of the river Thames near Richmond, south west London.
We were collecting plants and as my dad was identifying them he casually stated that every single plant is an individual, having small or minute differences. This statement totally grabbed my attention and got me thinking. Having considered this mass of swaying greenery as a whole, amidst its different varieties, I had not thought as plants standing on their own as individuals.
I then began researching plants, botany, taxonomy: the science. I explored how I felt about it firstly as a botanist’s daughter. How did something so wild and tangled get put in order and categorised; surrounding this, all the human interactions, relationships and emotions, an integral (often hidden) part of the process? Considering Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) who created taxonomy as a system for naming, ranking and classifying organisms, was rumoured to have classified his wife, I found the scientific way of classifying and ordering life challenged me as an artist.
It was around the time of the pandemic that walking became an important aspect of my art practice. I explored the abandoned quarries near to me in Somerset, with their epic concrete structures and found beauty and comfort in the plants reclamation of these spaces. Small saplings pushing through tarmac and rising up. Every step I took was accompanied by dialogue, either internal or with a friend, and I felt these thoughts and conversations resonated out and became part of the landscape. It was not only nurturing to me, but I felt I was contributing too by stepping, looking listening and becoming part of my surroundings.
I then won an artist’s residency in Igatu Brazil with Mirante Xique Xique, following a book of botanical trails written by my dad within the Chapada Diamantina, north east Brazil: an amazing natural environment punctuated with distinctive rock formations. I identified plants, walked the land and thought about my exploration as an artist and desire to reflect and respond to my experience in contrast to the botanical observations and notes made by my dad.
Weeds are Community began as a performative walk. The streets of my local town Frome were becoming greener as plants (considered weeds) pushed up and out from walls and drains, after there was a ban on certain weed killers. I began to think about these plants and how bombastic and beautiful they were. How plants can be categorised as desirable or not: decisions made on their value, and I saw a parallel to this with people and community.
I wanted to highlight and celebrate these overlooked plants and people.
With the help of a Micro Commission (Somerset Art Works with funding from Arts Council England) I worked in collaboration with artist Claire Beale to create an interactive walk which took us around the old streets of the town focusing on different plants such as the humble dandelion and twining these with local people. This included Queen of Meadows: an ode to meadow grass and Elsie. The construction and deconstruction of a tower within ‘Kingway’.
Elsie was part of Active and In Touch (for people who are isolated) one of the community groups, including Pod Plus (young people with disability) we worked with as part of the project.
Community engagement was in many ways the most valuable part of the project, many conversations about tending plants, weeds and life, singing, laughter, tears and feelings of togetherness. It allowed those who may not walk easily or feel intimidated by spaces to be part of ‘a walk’. We ran creative workshops casting small paper boats to be released down the gully in Cheap Street and made botanically printed flags to parade at the close of the event.
When I was commissioned to create a downloadable sound walk for Frome (supported by Frome town council, Black Swan Arts), I was a little out of my comfort zone. Although it had been an integral part of my performance, it was new to me and a sharp learning curve.
I immediately saw it as an opportunity to engage with all sorts of people and explore further thoughts surrounding nature, our lives and how they are often perceived as something separate when they’re not.
The Unsettlement is the title of the project as a whole. I had the exciting opportunity to work alongside writer Claire Carroll who created a separate walk and writes experimental fiction about the relationship between nature, technology and desire. Recently released: The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books (it’s brilliant!)
Weeds are Community, my walk, is an invitation to look closer at the organic fabric around us through weeds: plants you might overlook every day as they seek sanctuary in walls, reach up from drains and push through cracks in the pavement.
It asks you to take a stroll through the town’s streets reimagining these small but determined life forces that exist in tandem with the human spirit.
My sound work is a type of collage. Although based on the original performance it’s very different. I spoke and engage with a wide variety of people and groups including my 90 year old neighbour Jack who was born and lived in the same Somerset village all his life and was sent off to then Malaya in the 1940s to ‘protect’ the rubber plantations. We had many conversations about growing potatoes and life in this rural village, intertwined with the horrors of war and conflict. Such a positive person, but obviously carrying a burden. I had been trying to capture his whistling whilst he sat in my kitchen as I chopped vegetables for soup. Instead he shared a very moving moment which he allowed me to use within my final piece which is found at the ‘War graves’.
The wonderful Selwood Bounds, a troop of women Morris dancers based in Frome (a form of English folk dance), headed by Gwen Burns, features within ‘The Meadow’ and really informed my work. I became a bit of a groupie, following them around to their events and rehearsals recording them. This included a really fun photo shoot with Gwen which resulted in the visual aspect of the project.
Within The Meadow, I included sound from ‘Lost soundscapes English Meadow 1901’ which replicates the forgotten soundscape of the British countryside where there has been a 48% decline in British farmland bird species since the 1970s.
I also spoke with a northern Druid and Herbalist and took recordings from Beltane celebrations in Glastonbury, reflecting on the return for many to New Age or Pagan thinking with the desire to connect back with nature and make sense of themselves as part of it.
Simona Ciocarlan is a Romanian photographer and creative I met whilst doing an Erasmus residency in Cyprus last year based on the heritage art of Lefkara lace and we immediately connected through our shared interest of people, their lives and our desire to elevate and tell their stories. I asked Simona to write and perform a piece based on water, migration and flux for ‘The Gully’ in Cheap Street, both in English and Romanian, which I then played around with and overlaid with other sounds. This is probably the most beautiful and my favourite part of the walk.
This coming year I will be working on two new projects. One sees me returning to North East Brazil in search of Harleyodendron, a small tree, discovered by my dad on the coast in 1976. I will be exploring questions of identity and ownership. The other, ‘drifting dialogues’ is a collaboration with artist Claire Beale, supported by Somerset Art Works with funding from the Arts Council England.
Watch this space!
The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2024 will be announced around the start of 2025.