Last year we worked with 18 brilliant disabled creatives on our Young Artist Development Programme (YADP). Their work is featured in a new zine called “Department for Wonder and Play”, more about this here. In addition to the digital and physical publication, we’re going to spotlight each artist on the blog so you can get a deeper insight into their work and process. Over to Rosa to talk about their Radical Compost Generation Device.

My name is Rosa. I am an autistic multi-disciplinary creative and quiet activist. I am a quiet activist because traditional activist spaces are often inaccessible to me, and I firmly believe that quieter forms of activism – such as inclusive, transdisciplinary storytelling and sowing the seeds of radical imagination – are deeply important in dismantling current systems of oppression.

Through my work, I seek to gently decompose and playfully question dominant socio-ecological narratives, creating spaces to exchange stories with overlooked, marginalised and excluded people. I aim to use my work as a means of inviting people into a quietly radical creative corner, rather than holding up a picture for them to look at from a distance. I am interested in how artwork can give people tools to grow, play and dream, and in the role of the artist as a compost heap – decomposing ideas to create common ground for new ideas to sprout.

I have loved making paper models and toys since I was little, the kind you print out and fold. I especially like ones that move. I tried to imagine what sort of tools the Department for Wonder and Play would produce and what they might be used for. What might a tool for generating and imagining new worlds and possibilities look like? I am also really excited about soil ecology and compost, and how the weird and wonderful world of decomposition and decay is necessary for all life to grow and flourish.

For this project I also drew upon the work of Audre Lorde, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, earthworms and lots of microorganisms. In particular, I thought about Audre Lorde’s suggestion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s idea that “freedom is a place, and we make it, and we make it, and we make it”. All of these elements wandered and wriggled together to make a Radical Compost Generation Device.

I am a bit like a creative compost heap in the way I work. I love collecting images, ideas, sensory materials and processes, decomposing them and then recomposing them to make my work. For example, some of the microbes in my piece are collaged from pictures of mushrooms I found in a newspaper. The slug is a photograph of a slug called Claude who I made from clay, and who lives on a shelf in my bedroom. The snail is a photograph of a snail who decided to climb up my kitchen window. The soil and compost in my artwork is made from collaged photos of the soil and compost I have been making in our garden. So, this piece was a multispecies collaboration – all the microorganisms and fungi and earthworms and snails who share the garden also contributed to the zine.

This project is messy and unfinished. As a creative, I am always trying to unlearn and ask questions. Nothing in nature is ever “finished” or static or fixed – things are always changing, growing, decaying and mutating in endless cycles, all at different times and speeds. I am trying to approach my creative work like this too and question the tendency toward a perfect and final finished piece, produced as efficiently and quickly as possible. This is especially crucial for disabled artists, because our ways of being, processing and making, in our space and time, are not always honoured or respected.

It has been a privilege to work with Touretteshero, who have been especially good at reminding me to do my creative compost making in my own space and time.
One of my favourite facts about soil: a teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are humans on the planet.

Thanks so much to Rosa, and to all the dirt and organisms that contributed to this piece for the zine! You can download and print their Radical Compost Generation Device here.