Enclosure and the gut
Collapsing the hedgerow divide

This interdisciplinary talk brings together the Cluster for Cinema, Affect, Place at the University for the Creative Arts with colleagues in Fine Art, exploring the potential connections between artists in different disciplines engaging with the common.

Abstract

‘The herbs of the common had become weeds, the women of the common were witches’

The enclosure of the commons instigated a profound and damaging transformation in the web of relations that bound us as humans to the natural world and to our bodies. Not only were commoners, my peasant ancestors, removed from and subsequently denied access to the land they had relied on for their subsistence, so too were a world of social and cultural practices and beliefs destroyed. The consequences, particularly for women were even worse, with a systematic controlling of their bodies, their social relations and knowledge exchange with other women, resulting in the ultimate persecution of women as witches during the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Drawing on the work of Marxist feminist Silvia Federici’s ideas that connect the enclosure of land with that of a constraint on bodies and knowledge, I will share aspects of The Commons: Re-enchanting the World project co-curated with Catherine Morland, that was presented at The MERL (Museum of English Rural Life), University of Reading in March 2021 – April 2022. I will particularly focus on aspects of the project that I developed around commons, foraged or wild foods gathered for free to bypass our commercial food system: an unearthing of the knowledge of plants and their abundant nutrition. During the presentation, we will contemplate this severing from the land and the trauma we experience in our bodies, particularly in our gut. The lack of diversity of plants and microorganisms that we now eat results in a reduced microbiota which is having negative impact on our physical, mental and emotional selves.

Prior to the seminar, you will be invited to forage for some hawthorn or May tree blossom and/or leaves and will then be guided to make a simple infusion. It’s possible that the hawthorn you pick would have been planted as a result of the Enclosure Acts to act as boundaries. Together we will imbibe the tisane to feed our gut, collapse the hedgerow divide and enact interdependence and mutual coexistence as a counterbalance to our alienation from the natural world.

Speaker Bio

Artist, curator, researcher and senior lecturer in Fine Art at the University for the Creative Arts Farnham, Amanda Couch researches, reinterprets and reimagines histories, myth, ritual and embodied knowledge weaving the theoretical, personal, and material processes. Her work straddles the domains of performance, sculpture, photography, print and the book, food, the everyday, participation, and writing.

Alongside Catherine Morland, she co-curated The Commons: Re-enchanting the World (2020-22) at The MERL, University of Reading; performed online (2021) and in person (2016, 2019) at the Wellcome Library, London; performed and exhibited at the Royal College of Physicians, London, (2020). She had a solo show and performed at Ivy Arts Centre, University of Surrey (2018). Her work is in public and private collections, nationally and internationally and her writing is published internationally in journals, online, in books and in her artist book publications.