Category: Uncategorised

Artful Image Processing and Algorithmic Drawing

by Lazarus Chan

Having set up the object detection pipeline, I proceeded to the image processing stage, where the raw visual data and the model’s outputs are transformed into a more artistic representation. My process involved several key steps. First, I applied edge detection algorithms to the video frames. This technique identifies points in a digital image where the brightness changes sharply, effectively outlining the shapes and contours of objects in the scene. Next, I inverted the black and white colour, creating a stark, high-contrast visual style. Finally, I took the bounding boxes generated by the YOLO detection model and redrew them onto this processed image. This layering of machine perception over a stylised version of reality creates a compelling visual dialogue between the actual scene and the AI’s interpretation of it.

Processing Perceptions with YOLO and the COCO Dataset

by Lazarus Chan

With the video pipeline established, I turned my attention to processing the visual data using a combination of powerful tools. The core of this stage is the YOLO (You Only Look Once) object detection model. YOLO is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system that identifies and classifies objects in a single pass of an image, making it incredibly fast and efficient. For this project, I am intentionally using the model with the pre-trained COCO (Common Objects in Context) dataset. The COCO dataset is a large-scale collection of images depicting common objects in everyday scenes and is a standard benchmark for training and evaluating computer vision models.

My goal is not to achieve flawless object recognition but rather to play with the inherent “mistakes” and misinterpretations the machine makes. The default COCO dataset is perfectly suited for this, as its generalised training can lead to incorrect predictions when applied to novel or ambiguous scenes. To manipulate the image data, which is essentially a collection of pixels, I am using NumPy (Numerical Python). NumPy is a fundamental library for scientific computing in Python that allows for efficient manipulation of large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices—the very structure that represents digital images.

What is Object Detection?

Object detection is a field of computer vision and image processing concerned with identifying and locating instances of objects within images and videos. Unlike simple image classification, which assigns a single label to an entire image, object detection models draw bounding boxes around each detected object and assign a class label to it, providing more detailed information about the scene.

What are NumPy and the COCO Dataset?

  • NumPy: A Python library that provides support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a collection of mathematical functions to operate on these arrays. In image processing, an image is treated as a 3D array (height, width, colour channels), making NumPy an indispensable tool for any pixel-level manipulation.
  • COCO Dataset: Standing for “Common Objects in Context,” this is a massive dataset designed for object detection, segmentation, and captioning tasks. It contains hundreds of thousands of images with millions of labelled object instances across 80 “thing” categories and 91 “stuff” categories, providing a rich foundation for training computer vision models.

Objects Detectable by the COCO Dataset:

The COCO dataset can identify 80 common object categories, including:

  • People: person
  • Vehicles: bicycle, car, motorcycle, airplane, bus, train, truck, boat
  • Outdoor: traffic light, fire hydrant, stop sign, parking meter, bench
  • Animals: bird, cat, dog, horse, sheep, cow, elephant, bear, zebra, giraffe
  • Accessories: backpack, umbrella, handbag, tie, suitcase
  • Sports: frisbee, skis, snowboard, sports ball, kite, baseball bat, baseball glove, skateboard, surfboard, tennis racket
  • Kitchen: bottle, wine glass, cup, fork, knife, spoon, bowl
  • Food: banana, apple, sandwich, orange, broccoli, carrot, hot dog, pizza, donut, cake
  • Furniture: chair, couch, potted plant, bed, dining table, toilet
  • Electronics: tv, laptop, mouse, remote, keyboard, cell phone
  • Appliances: microwave, oven, toaster, sink, refrigerator
  • Indoor: book, clock, vase, scissors, teddy bear, hair drier, toothbrush

Weaving a World Model with Reinforcement Learning Concepts

by Lazarus Chan

With a large dataset of generated policies, the next step is to import them back into the primary software application that displays the 360-degree video. This integration allows the dynamically generated rules to influence the visual output or behaviour of the system in real-time. My use of the term “policy” is a deliberate nod to its origins in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL), a concept dating back to the 1990s. In RL, a policy is the strategy an agent employs to make decisions and take actions in its environment. It is the core component that dictates the agent’s behaviour as it learns through trial and error to maximise cumulative reward. By generating policies based on visual input, my system is, in a sense, creating its own world model—a simplified, learned representation of its environment and the relationships within it. This process echoes the fundamental principles of how an AI agent learns to react to and make sense of the real world, a topic I have delved into in more detail in some of my earlier writings.

Generating AI Policies from Object Proximity

by Lazarus Chan

In a more experimental turn, I developed a separate piece of software to explore the concept of emergent behaviour based on the object detection output. This program uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate “policies” when objects from the COCO dataset are detected in close proximity on the screen. The system calculates the normalised distance between the bounding boxes of detected objects. This distance value is then fed to the LLM, which has been prompted to generate a policy or rule based on the perceived danger or interaction potential of the objects being close together. For instance, if a “person” and a “car” are detected very close to each other, the LLM might generate a high-alert policy, whereas a “cup” and a “dining table” would result in a benign, functional policy. This creates a dynamic system where the AI is not just identifying objects, but also creating a narrative or a set of rules about their relationships in the environment.

Setting the software with 360-Degree Vision

by Lazarus Chan

The initial phase of this project involved tackling the technical groundwork required to process 360-degree video. I began by using OpenCV, a powerful open-source computer vision library, to stitch together the two separate video feeds from my 360-degree camera. OpenCV is an essential tool for real-time image and video processing, providing the necessary functions to merge the hemispheric views into a single, equirectangular frame. After successfully connecting the camera to my computer, I set up a basic Python workspace within my integrated development environment (IDE). The next step was to write a script that could access the camera’s video stream and display it in a new window, confirming that the foundational hardware and software were communicating correctly. This setup provides the visual canvas upon which the subsequent layers of AI-driven interpretation will be built.

Embracing the Algorithmic Uncanny

by Lazarus Chan

I am revisiting a creative process that has captivated my interest for some time: enabling an agent to perceive and learn about its environment through the lens of a computer vision model. In a previous exploration, I experimented with CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training), which led to the whimsical creation of a sphere composed of text, a visual representation of the model’s understanding. This time, however, my focus shifts to the YOLO (You Only Look Once) model. My prior experiences with YOLO, using the default COCO dataset, often yielded amusingly incorrect object detections—a lamp mistaken for a toilet, or a cup identified as a person’s head. Instead of striving for perfect accuracy, I intend to embrace these algorithmic errors. This project will be a playful exploration of the incorrectness and the fascinating illusions generated by an AI model, turning its faults into a source of creative inspiration.

* visualization using CLIP and Blender for artwork “Golem Wander in Crossroads”

Ultralytics YOLO

https://docs.ultralytics.com

Ultralytics YOLO is a family of real-time object detection models renowned for their speed and efficiency. Unlike traditional models that require multiple passes over an image, YOLO processes the entire image in a single pass to identify and locate objects, making it ideal for applications like autonomous driving and video surveillance. The architecture divides an image into a grid, and each grid cell is responsible for predicting bounding boxes and class probabilities for objects centered within it. Over the years, YOLO has evolved through numerous versions, each improving on the speed and accuracy of its predecessors.
(Text from Gemini-2.5-Pro and edited by artist)

CLIP

https://github.com/openai/CLIP

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training), developed by OpenAI, is a neural network that learns visual concepts from natural language descriptions. It consists of two main components: an image encoder and a text encoder, which are trained jointly on a massive dataset of 400 million image-text pairs from the internet. This allows CLIP to create a shared embedding space where similar images and text descriptions are located close to one another. A key capability of CLIP is “zero-shot” classification, meaning it can classify images into categories it wasn’t explicitly trained on, simply by providing text descriptions of those categories.

(Text from Gemini-2.5-Pro and edited by artist)

COCO

https://cocodataset.org/#home

https://docs.ultralytics.com/datasets/detect/coco

COCO (Common Objects in Context), is a large-scale object detection, segmentation, and captioning dataset. It is designed to encourage research on a wide variety of object categories and is commonly used for benchmarking computer vision models. It is an essential dataset for researchers and developers working on object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation tasks.

(Text from Ultralytics YOLO Docs)

The Dream Pool Backrooms

by Leah Clements

A computer generated image of a room covered in white tiles, from ceiling to walls to floor. In its centre is a circular hole in the ceiling through which a pillar extends, and a staircase spirals around. The room is half full of turquoise water. In the background, a tunnel leads elsewhere.

Since I went to Bath, I’ve been dreaming about its backrooms. Divots in sandy stone filled with green water that I can slide my arm into, an exact fit. Semi-organic cave networks getting darker and deeper, pools of water deep and shallow suspended and plunging at different levels.

Do you know about The Backrooms? They’re this concept of liminal spaces, usually devoid of living beings, that you can enter by leaving reality. There’s a Dream Pool genre of Backrooms that I’ve been following for a while, and earlier this year a game: Dreamcore, came out which holds a lot of these to explore. There’s something cyclical about recognising these as a pocket of your subconscious mind, then taking the images back into your sleep…

Another entirely tiled room. These tiles are pastel pink, and in the centre of the room is a hexagon shaped pool full of water. The room follows its shape and two doorways are opposite us, on two of the sides of the shape. One leads to darkness, it looks like a stairway downstairs. The other has a staircase upstairs, and an orange rectangular light from an unknown source illuminates it.
Another tiled space, this one dark and gloomy. It's the corner of a swimming pool from above, where the metal ladder leads into the water. It plunges down into an unrealistic depth, mysterious and dark.
A room in a 1960s minimalist style. An expanse of plain floor and ceiling space, marked only by the reflections of ripples of an oblong pool on the left. These reflections also pick out a large sphere at the back of the room, a plain sofa on the right, and some more ornamental sphere shapes, much smaller. Above the pool is a black expanse, perhaps a night sky, perhaps a blank ceiling.
A sunlit white tiled interior. The walls curve in a wavy line, a long thin pool following them, and a pillar that seems architecturally functionally useless. At least, according to waking logic.
A dark underground space, all tiled. It looks like a subway or somewhere corporate and abandoned - but only recently - a still living plant in a plant box at the right. The kind you find outside an office block. A stairway upwards leads to darkness, and an ankle-deep measure of water pervades throughout, strangely purple, showing ripples of movement from nothing we can see capable of motion. It seems lit by a torch, whilst the edges recede into blackness.
A dark white tiled space with a winding thin pool lit by spotlights from above. A rubber ring floats on its surface next to a metal ladder leading into it.
A very creepy pool interior. An abandoned public swimming pool - a colourful spiral flume at the left, and a converted industrial looking ceiling with institutional lighting. But they don't fully light the space, it's a bit too dark to be comfortable, and unnervingly misty.
A sunlit white tiled interior, half full of turquoise water. Two doorways on different wall in front of us fall back into a never-ending series of doorways behind them.

by Elora Kadir

Had a little moment earlier in the week feeling the breeze on my hand while in traffic. I wanted to recreate this image or at least experiment with this idea a little more but then some barriers got in the way (broken lifts) so I’ve been stuck indoors for a couple days.

An arm hangs out a car window t on a tree-lined street In London. The car's side mirror reflects the hand feeling a gentle breeze. It is a sunny day.

At the Altar

by Leah Clements

‘Those seeking divine help for an illness or affliction might rest overnight in special temple buildings. On waking, priests of the Roman god of healing, Aesculapius, helped them interpret their dreams or visions’

I made it to the temple.

A museum banner in a pillared 18th century interior. On it is a Roman sculpted face, obscured on shadow and picked out on dramatic light. It reads ‘the goddess awaits you at the temple of Sulis Minerva’
A stone sculpted head in a dark space. It’s on a plinth and its mouth and nose have eroded away, leaving blank eyes and and impressive plaited hair arrangement like a crown over her head.
A coffin underfoot, under glass. It is small and yellowish, made of an unknown material. It is enclosed at one end, and warped by its two thousand years.
Behind a statue, its cape hanging in folds, we look down upon the green bath from a height. The statue’s counterparts face it opposite, along the walkway which follows around the edge of the bath. Each of them is permanently posed, guarding or adorning the watery centre.
Up close at the corner of the bath. The cut stone corner descends in steps, the water consumes them in its milky green opacity.
A central view of the bath from the bathside: a green rectangular body of water, Roman pillars surrounding it. A small walkway runs behind the pillars, ending at ancient walls. Above, statues line a balcony, and the windows of other old (but perhaps less ancient) buildings surround it.

Image IDs in Alt Text, Video IDs here:

  1. A green body of water, edged in stone. At this corner, a flat rock – perhaps an ancient seat – is laid over a stream trickling underneath it, from a source behind, into the milky green pool. We zoom out and see more of the walkway behind, and the length of the bath. Pillars surround the edge of the pool, receding into darkness behind. We zoom back in to the gentle trickling. 
  2. Hot steaming water gushes out of an arched hole. Dark and underground, its surfaces stained orange by sulphur or some mysterious element.
  3. A hot, bubbling green thermal spring. It is contained by straight stone edges, cut into a square with a corner lopped off where the wall of a building in the same material meets it.  We zoom into the bubbles, becoming consumed by it.
  4. Water rippling gently in the sun, down its shallow stone path. The surface underneath is stained orange by something, something invisible in the clear water. It flows underneath a stone slab, and into its destination: the large body of green water. We follow its small journey.

REST without AI

by Lazarus Chan

This week, Hong Kong was battered by heavy rain, and I took the chance to take a breather and recharge. The last few weeks have been manic. I’ve been working on three software projects at once. The non-stop pace had left me totally overloaded, so this rain break was just what I needed. I decided to visit my wife home village, a recharging place in the middle of the city’s forests. The air smelt of earth, and the quiet beauty of the landscape was a nice change. I could feel the tension of my tightly wound days begin to unravel, replaced by a sense of calm that felt long overdue. The mountains were like silent guards, making me think about the balance between creativity and rest.

by Elora Kadir

I might have got myself a little stuck in my searches. I tried a few online image libraries… trawling the many pages of the Wellcome Collection’s catalogue which I still haven’t reached the end of.

I already have examples of what I would like from some of my previous work that I have shared so I’m giving myself a reminder that the task isn’t impossible. I am considering the thought that maybe I’m already surrounded by the images I’m looking for. For example, I have a mug with this John William Waterhouse painting on it.

A 19th-century painting depicting Saint Cecilia seated in a garden, eyes closed in serene contemplation, with an open book resting on her lap. Two angels kneel before her, one playing a violin and the other holding an instrument. Behind them, a stone balustrade overlooks a harbor with ships and distant mountains. The scene is filled with lush roses and greenery, evoking a peaceful, spiritual atmosphere.
Saint Cecilia (1895) by John William Waterhouse

Books on Drawing™️

by Elora Kadir

Wanted to include some phone images I took from a book on drawing people that I found in the local library. There are loads of them on drawing people, cats, dogs, flowers, buildings… It’s all very Drawing™️.

An image of an open book. The left page shows a man's trunk sketched and his head turned to the side. The right page includes a few sketches each focusing on different sections of the trunk.

A little fascinated by the eery “perfection” of it all. Especially in this book which was full of sketches and descriptions of muscles that make up a body part and how to combine it all together on a super athletic male body. It’s quite the opposite to what I was hoping to find when I set out on this search for images. It’s almost too healthy and tense. There’s no ease.

An image of an open book. The left pag has text explaining how different parts of the head come together. The right page includes a few sketches each focusing on different aspects of a head such as the skull and different perspectives.

A page from a book showing a drawing of a shoulder with every muscle clearly highlighted.

The Question: 11AUG2025

by Lazarus Chan

The modern AI, most prominently represented by the Large Language Models (LLMs), prompts a fundamental question: Does it contain consciousness? To pose the question another way, the original wellspring of the AI concept is found where brain scientists, computer scientists and mathematicians began to explore if consciousness itself could be understood as a mathematical or computational process, as a system. This inquiry delves into whether today’s advanced automation is merely sophisticated mimicry or a genuine step towards the sentient machines envisioned by pioneers of the field. As Noam Chomsky openly criticises the GPT model as a fake intelligence, a copycat only. Or is there an even deeper question: is there any form of computing that can capture the differences between intelligence, awareness and consciousness? Or we simply don’t understand our kind. Those three words are just a game of our language, a misconception; they never exist.

Catastrophic Forgetting

by Lazarus Chan

The contemporary world is becoming increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence (AI) models, some of which are known as ‘world models’. While these concepts gained significant attention in 2025, their origins can be traced much further back. Jürgen Schmidhuber introduced the foundational architecture for planning and reinforcement learning (RL) involving interacting recurrent neural networks (RNNs)—including a controller and a world model—in 1990. In this framework, the world model serves as an internal, differentiable simulation of the environment, learning to predict the outcomes of the controller’s actions. By simulating these action-consequence chains internally, the agent can plan and optimise its decisions. This approach is now commonly used in video prediction and simulations within game engines, yet it remains closely related to cameras and image processing.

Despite the advancements made, a fundamental limitation first identified in 1990 continues to challenge the progress: the problem of instability and catastrophic forgetting. As the controller guides the agent into new areas of experience, there is a risk that the network will overwrite previously learned knowledge. This leads to fragile, non-lifelong learning, where new information erases older representations. Furthermore, Prof. Yann LeCun mentioned in his presentation ‘The Shape of AI to Come’ at the AI Action Summit’s Science Days at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris) that the volume of data that a large language model contains remains minimal compared to that of a four-year-old child’s data volume, as 1.1E14 bytes. One of the titles of his slides that has stayed in my mind is “Auto-Regressive Generative Models Suck!” In the area of reinforcement learning, the AI’s policies often remain static, unable to adapt to the unforeseen complexities of the real world — in other words, the AI does not learn after the training process. Recently, emerging paradigms like Liquid Neural Networks (Ramin Hasani) and Dynamic Deep Learning (Richard Sutton) attempt to address this rigidity. However, those approaches are still highly reliant on randomly selecting and cleaning a neural network inside, to maintain the learning dynamic and potentially improve real-time reaction and long-term learning. Nevertheless, they are still facing challenges in solving the problem of AI’s hallucinations. A fundamental paradigm shift for AI is needed in our time, but it takes time, and before that, this paradigm may already be overwhelming for both machines and humans.

Welcome

by Lazarus Chan

Photographed by YEUNG Tsz Ying


Hi, welcome to my online space. My name is Lazarus Chan, and I am a new media artist now based in Hong Kong.

My work crosses the intersections of science, technology, the humanities, and art, and I am particularly fascinated by themes of consciousness, time, and artificial intelligence. Much of my work is related to generative art and installations, posing questions from a humanistic and philosophical standpoint. I will create a new work, “Stochastic Camera (version 0.4) – weight of witness”, in August 2025, and you can follow my progress here.

This studio is an online space for me to continue my explorations and share my thoughts with you. I will write a series of posts, sharing my ongoing reflections on AI as it becomes more integrated into our world.

You are welcome to leave a comment and send me questions.

Lazarus Chan

More about the photo:
https://www.lazaruschan.com/artwork/golem-wander-in-crossroads

WELCOME TO MY STUDIO

by Leah Clements

Leah crouching down next to a very large dibond photograph. She's a white woman with dark blonde hair up in a bun, wearing all black. The photograph is 2metres tall and 3metres wide, and rests on white foam blocks. It is mostly darkness and shade, but at its left side glows into a warm red flare, over rippling sunlit water. The room might be a studio or domestic dating, with wooden floors and a closed door, framed photo on the wall, and a door buzzer phone on the left.

Hi, I’m Leah Clements, an artist from and based in East London. 

I’m really interested in moments of transcendence – these might be near death or out of body experiences, or profound shifts in psychology or physicality. Sometimes this is very scientific, sometimes it veers towards the paranormal. I want to get to these moments where you have one foot in this world and the other in another.

A lot of this comes from being chronically ill myself, but this point of departure usually expands outwards into other people’s experiences, with an intent to re-collectivise.

During the residency I’m planning to work on a new moving image scene where icons from ancient, medieval, and contemporary sites will come together to forge a new symbol. This is growing out of my research into apopheny vs epiphany (more on that later!)  and thinking about how we look for meaning when it feels lacking, and whether we can know if we’re looking for it in the right or wrong places. It will give me a chance to try (and play about with) a new technique of animation in film editing. 

Comment any thoughts you have, or ask me questions – I look forward to sharing some of my research into this and talking with you about it…

Welcome to my studio

by Artist Test

I’m excited to be part of this residency and to have the opportunity to focus, reflect, and share my process in a more open way than I typically allow.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be using this time and space to explore how repetition, memory, and digital tools intersect — particularly how small acts of making can accumulate into something slower, quieter, and more intentional.

My practice often shifts between design and more contemplative visual work, and I’m interested in what happens when the usual boundaries blur — when something functional begins to feel poetic, or when a mistake reveals a new direction.

This residency is as much about paying attention as it is about producing. I’ll be sharing fragments, trials, and thoughts along the way.

Un-making becomes un-gardening…

by Bella Milroy

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…

A digital photograph, landscape, colour, of what looks like a messy allotment plot on a cold winters day. It is a bright sunny day at what looks like sunset. The plot has all the usual allotment features like raised beds, sheds etc, and there is lots of bare patches and overgrown patches. The scene is calm, ordinary and quite beautiful in the winter light
The allotment in January 2022

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.

A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like some kind of garden or allotment plot on a winters day. There are bare trees in the background, and in front of them is a polly-tunnel covered in green mesh and some plants growing inside. In the foreground is a large rectangular raised bed covered in cardboard and what looks like a scattering of compost.
The first bed at the allotment with cardboard over it and a sprinkling of mulch
a digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like a close up detail of some card board and paper on the ground, with big clods of compost or dirt scattered on top.
the first scatterings of mulch on cardboard
a digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like a close up detail of some card board and paper on the ground, with big clods of compost or dirt scattered on top.
mulching as mark-making
A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like some kind of garden or allotment plot on a winters day. There are bare trees in the background, and in front of them is a poly-tunnel covered in green mesh and some plants growing inside. In the foreground is a large rectangular raised bed covered in cardboard and what looks like a heavy mulch of compost.
The first bed of the plot part-mulched with cardboard underneath

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.

A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like some kind of garden or allotment plot on a winters day. There are bare trees in the background, and in front of them is a polly-tunnel covered in green mesh and some plants growing inside. In the foreground is what looks like a large rectangular raised bed covered in grey-black plastic sheeting. It looks like it is weighed down with lots of random objects such as timber, pallets and bricks.
The first bed of the plot mulched and covered in plastic sheeting
A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like a birds eye view of the ground of some kind of garden or field. To the right of the image is a bare, grassy, muddy patch of earth. To the left of the image is what looks like some kind of grey-black plastic sheeting held down by lumps of brick.
allotment collage
A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like some kind of allotment or garden scene and a large patch of earth covered up in grey-black plastic. There is a lot of garden junk such as compost bins, wooden pallets and bricks.
the mulched bed becomes a covered swimming pool
A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like a birds eye view of the ground of some kind of garden or field. To the bottom of the image is a bare, grassy, muddy patch of earth. There is a pair of feet in red trainers standing on the grass, perhaps belonging to the person taking the photo. To the top of the image is what looks like some kind of grey-black plastic sheeting held down by lumps of brick.

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.

on un-making…

by Bella Milroy

An image of the front cover of Polly Atkin's 2021 poetry collection. At the bottom of the cover are the title details which read "Much With Body; Polly Atkin; "This is serious play indeed"- Vahni Capildeo; Poetry Book Society Recommendation". The cover image is of what looks like a watercolour painting of a figure lying prone on their back floating in a greeny-blue water. Their body is viewed just below the water's surface which we can see rippling at the very top of the image.

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 want to say no on my own terms I want to say no without an asterisk to my body I want to say no with confidence I want to say no to everything I want to stop saying no I want saying no to be a singular event I want saying no to occur in isolated vocabulary as its dictionary definition intended I want saying no to stop corresponding with my limits I want to understand what saying no means I want others to understand what saying no means I want saying no to stop making me feel scared of saying yes I want saying no to become less spikey and difficult I want saying no to become comfortable I want saying no to be collaborative I want saying no to be assertive I want to say no out loud I want it to hurt less when I say no I want to know when to say no I want to know when to say no I want saying no to make me feel better I want to say no without baggage I want to say no without explaining I want to say no without saying no I want to say no telepathically I want saying no to weigh less I want saying no to mean more I want saying no to mean less I want to say no without apologising I want to say no without apologising I want to say no without apologising I want to say no in liberation I want to say no in dedication I want to say no in warm hugs and virtual kisses in text messages I want to say no and mean it I want to say no and choose it I want to say no in support I want to say no without thinking I want to say no without guilt I want to take ownership of saying no I want to say no without saying no Today I said no to gardening, bathing, reading, instagram, emails, text messages, cooking. Did I actually 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.

greenhouse reflections 1

by Bella Milroy

A digital photograph (portrait, colour), of what looks like the interior of a greenhouse. There is dry, brown soil at the bottom of the image, with thin struts of grey aluminum supports running vertically up the left of the image, with a bracing piece running at an angle across it. Behond the large panels of glass we can see a mass of green foliage with what looks like yellow snail shells hanging seemingly suspended between the greenery and the glass. The foliage is dense and thick, and we cannot see anything behind it. It looks like to could be nettles but it isnt clear. There are a number of reflections in the glass caprturing the rest of the greenhouse structure and other shapes. There looks like there may be a figure captured in the reflection of the glass, with them wearing a patterned jumper and a cap, but it is only faintly visible. At the base of the glass lies a small heap of wilted leaves from a plant as if wilted in heat. The image is strange, ordinary and calm.

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.

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