I thought about Polly Atkin’s poem Unwalking (referenced in my last post) a lot when i first returned back to my allotment plot in January 2022, having not visiting the site for 2 years due to shielding. We had been given formal notice by the allotment committee to either improve the plot or end our tenancy. I was in the midst of an intensely difficult period in my life, and I was unsure of whether the commitment was possible to continue. i was trying to figure out having a career as an artist whilst being sick, and how to do those things in a sustainable way that doesn’t just leave you burnt out. I believe that this figuring out will be a lifelong mission, one that never has a fixed answer. I still go through periods (just very recently in fact), where it feels like living in this body feels truly incompatible with a career as an artist. But what did become clear when returning to my allotment in 2022, was that in rediscovering my gardening practice, I could do something more than just survive my body and my job; i could build something bigger, something beyond myself. I decided to give myself 6 weeks and to see what might happen…

This was the first photo i took of what the plot looked like when I first returned back in January 2022. It was such a special afternoon. it was a weekday and I had been working, and my mum had asked if I wanted to go to the plot just to have a look. I was reluctant. part of having an energy-limiting condition means that i never know when i am over exerting myself, and i am always second guessing myself as to whether or not the thing i did is what made my pain worse. It’s a particularly challenging aspect of living with sickness, and something I find really hard within the context of a career. So re-engaging with the allotment again on a normal working day felt pretty extreme; simply leaving the house and turning up felt like i was pushing my boundaries of what was possible (it always does). But that afternoon, i felt the spark of what has always drawn me to gardening, and amongst all the overgrown weeds and debris, i felt excited to think what might be possible here.

Polly’s poem Unwalking was in my head a lot as we began grappling with how to go about using the space again. It became clear quite quickly, that the only way to manage the space at this point – whilst existing in crip-time – was to cover most of it up. So that’s what the first year was spent doing; taking things down and very slowly mulching and covering the beds. We began by adopting a no-dig approach by placing cardboard over the beds, then covering them in a mulch of compost or manure.

This mulching process was so exciting; it felt like i was making these large scale collages with muck and cardboard. Again, scale becomes a really exciting component of what draws me to this gardening practice. I love feeling in awe of bigness, to feel like i’m in the presence of something much, much bigger than me. I think i’m always searching (even in the smallest of artworks i make) for the feeling i get when i’m next to a huge lump of gritstone rock at Curbar Edge, my local rock face in the Peak District National Park. It’s the same feeling i get when i experience Wolfgang Tillmans work in the flesh, where the bigness just carries me away across landscapes and into another space. When mulching and covering the beds at the allotment, all of a sudden it moved beyond an ordinary gardening task and became a kind of space-making.

I often describe my work building the rose garden (and maintaining an allotment plot in general) as totally absurd; trying to get my sick and tired body to sculpt this huge space simply feels a bit ridiculous when met with what that space demands of my very limited energy. It feels like i’m being asked to hold the space up as if it were some kind of giant inflatable shape, and all i have are my tired arms to try and keep it from falling over and rolling away. Sometimes it feels like the chanting at a football match, the way the chorus from the crowd at one and the same time feel both like a buoyant wave of singing and a crash of noise imploding; always on the edge of collapse. And I do have help. it would be impossible to do it without it, and wrong of me not to clarify this essential component of my access to this practice. And even with this, the task at hand still feels enormous. But i think that might be part of what fuels the work in this way. This whole existence – enduring/living/loving through sickness – is absurd. It’s an outrageous request that is demanded of our bodies, of our minds, of our spirit. But I think i’m interested in what happens when I sit with sickness, hold hands with it, move through this world by its side instead of operating from a place of abandon or rejection or cure. I want to hold myself holding sickness, and find the vast landscapes within upon which to settle.

After heavily mulching the cardboard we then covered the beds in black plastic sheeting to block out all light, and allow the weeds to rot down into the soil ready for planting in the autumn. This really enhanced the sense that i was working with a kind of collage. The beds immediately looked like covered up swimming pools, and i loved playing with the various allotment debris that we had gathered to weigh down the sheeting. This whole process took up the entire first year of the work we did on the plot. There was little to no “proper” gardening (as in sowing/planting/cultivating) in that first year. And yet, I was there, I was at home dreaming about it, I was making something, committing time and energy to a place with a hope to emerge into a future. All the components of a garden were present; I was ungardening.

Despite the plot now looking significantly different to that first year, i am still ungardening. As with everything that is allowed to work on crip-time, ungardening facilitates whole ways of experiencing the garden that would otherwise be lost. Ungardening allows for me to keep my body at the centre of my gardening practice, and for the garden to exist beyond me. rather than a singular space, the garden becomes a shifting, interconnected ground of thinking and growing and imagining and living and dying. more than anything, ungardening reminds me that the garden is made for made for my absence, and my absence holds more than a missing body.

When describing what process means to me in my practice, i continually find myself drawn to the poem Unwalking by Polly Atkin, which is featured in her 2021 collection Much With Body, published by Seren Books. It is a striking piece which really captures an atmosphere of sickness in such an embodied way. I love it, and find myself returning to it again and again, pulling at its imaginative terminologies and applying them to my own ideas of making/un-making.

“The body is what I cannot untake with me what I cannot

leave behind what i cannot not discover, continually, along the way”

Unwalking by Polly Atkin, which is featured in her 2021 collection Much With Body, published by Seren Books. Permission has been granted by the author to quote from this work here.

I love the richness of how she is inverting that sense of the body’s lacking, the body’s un-abled-ness, the body… not; how in it’s un-doing, it holds it’s own forever-presense, forever-doing, the un becoming full and energetically creative. It makes me think of a text i wrote a few years ago as part of my work for the 30/30 project in 2019. The prompt for the day was “how do you say no?”.

I like this way of approaching the innate sense of lacking in which illness and disability is fixed in society and culture, by sitting with it, in it; what do the no’s that we have to say/do/feel, embody for us? What happens when the unmoving, the unwalking, becomes the central journey? what expansive landscapes can be found when we consider the lacking as an entire other world, a world which is lived? I’ve been thinking a lot recently about illness and disability as place, and how exciting that is as a concept to explore. I am about to launch a curatorial project exploring art and disability in rural spaces called Further Afield, and the artists featured in the programme have created some beautiful works interrogating this idea of the body in place and the place in/as the body. It’s such an exciting premise to think about, using the body as the central space in which all journeys occur and all worlds emerge and interact. Another line from Polly’s Unwalking that i love:

“There are destinations without journeys, things you will never see if you

walk walk walk walk walk

…

I do not have to move to be moved. Are you moved?“

Unwalking by Polly Atkin, which is featured in her 2021 collection Much With Body, published by Seren Books. Permission has been granted by the author to quote from this work here.

Here the location is the body, and this further inversion of action is stretched; movement becoming a dense, energetic rock containing life after life after life; stillness becoming a hum; motion condensed into a clenched fist; action stored in the knuckles of a held breath.

the line “I do not have to move to be moved”, is a masterpiece in capturing how powerful some moments of sickness can be. I can have the most intimate, magical connections with other people whom i have never been in the same room with, all whilst i lie in bed in the dark. ideas arrive in my head at times when i am at my most debilitated by pain. inspiration often occurs amongst the dullness, the ordinary fabric of a sick life. The prompt “Are you moved?” really strikes me as an invitation to a non-sick/non-disabled reader to not only consider this world that goes unnoticed, unseen, untouched, but to also consider what a kind of lacking could embody in the the non-disabled world, how perhaps in a world of constant movement, the lack is found in the absence of the un-moving; so many are simply not unmoved. Again, the body is repositioned as this central space, it becomes the space. I love exploring scale in my work in this same way, how so much of illness for me is about how to find vastness within the small and the cramped. For me, when Polly conjures this image of stillness, she is also capturing vastness; i want to take this central space of the body and zoom into in until it becomes massive, boundless. In this way it is impossible for making to be anything other than forever-present, a constant conjuring and collaboration with my body’s own limits.

I find myself continually drawn to creating images found in reflective surfaces, inspired by the way they facilitate image-making and how portraits can be captured in these transient spaces. In 2022, I created a solo show of self portraits and images found in reflective surfaces found in my home which was displayed at Level Centre, Derbyshire. The series was titled Sick Gaze, and explored the views, observations and contemplations both of and from the perspective of the sick body amongst domesticity. The images were printed onto brushed dibond. I loved creating this series, and i always want to pursue these ideas of image-making further.

I took this photo at the allotment inside the greenhouse, and suddenly i found it a really interesting place to consider these reflective concepts of sickness caught in a momentary image. What i was trying to explore in Sick Gaze was some of the vastness found in the small, cramped spaces of the sick existence in domesticity. Scale is endlessly fascinating to me as a sick artist, how sickness is often a practice of taking those small, cramped experiences of sameness and sitting with them, zooming in until they become vast landscapes. I hadn’t really considered how these ideas could be applied outside of domestic interiors, and it’s really interesting to me to think about how the allotment functions for me in this way.

I’m interested in the threshold of where the disabled body leaves the private space and meets a public one, and how the liminality of sick and disabled experiences results in this threshold often becoming a permanent state of being. The allotment holds lots of this sentiment in that way; not open to the public yet not wholly private, external architecture creating pockets of interior shelter found in sheds, greenhouses, chicken pens and polytunnels. We don’t live there, but the domestic finds itself out in the open all the time; old carpets used as weed suppressant, milk bottles on canes to scare the pigeons, bathtubs become waterbutts and salvaged windowpanes make up magnificent glass houses. I love the architecture of the allotment, this strange jumble of wreckage and bounty, it has a language all of its own. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way this language disrupts, how there is never a clear line of sight at the allotment, your gaze constantly interrupted by the combination of the knackered rake and rubble weighing down the tarp on a shed roof, the slump of a muck heap half covered or the debris of community life that the allotment often hosts like the storing of youth football club nets. It makes me think of illness as disruption, how there is never any straight line found in that landscape either. I love to think about gardening in this way, utilising design by not removing the disruptions but finding breaks and gaps amongst it, finding a kinship in the constant collaboration between my body and its own disruptive, uncomfortable limits.

I’m tired now and so I’m going to leave it there for now… I haven’t shared my writing/thoughts like this publically for some years now, having once been very present online via my Instagram @bella.milroy. It all feels very alien to me now to share my thoughts in a live/contemporary way like this, to share text that isn’t very polished or fully thought out. But this residency has been the first time i’ve made work in this way for so long now and i’m trying to embrace the format. It feels a bit weird, scary and nice.

Digital scans of Couch Grass roots taken from the allotment.

Couch Grass is a native grass to the UK that is an important food source for butterfly and moth caterpillars, as well as being incredibly fast growing. Left unchecked, it tunnels its way throughout the ground using its piercing runners to create rhizomes, and swamps everything it encounters. An elegant and graceful species, it is also very difficult to maintain in the garden, and can easily overwhelm other plants if left unmanaged. 

It’s a real bastard to weed, its roots forming interconnected pathways under shallow soil. Upon pulling at a clump, you can easily break one of the extensive runners, simply leaving behind another plant ready to break through the ground and grow on. But every now and again you can find yourself picking at loose, dry topsoil where all of a sudden you are lifting a root-runner from the ground like a hidden rope found in sand in some desert-island-fiction. Perfect lengths of tough, sinewy roots are untangled from the soil, often pulling whole clumps of grass with it. My favourite part of the plant however, is the brand new runners that form these blanched white spears just below the soil surface. They are so neat and clean, pushing their way through the earth in energetic spikes. There’s something about the contrast of the tangled mass of older roots that form the clumps of grass, and the newness of these glossy threads that makes for a very satisfying and tactile interaction when weeding this plant in the garden.