John Newling Peterborough Soil
Peterborough Museum and art gallery (8 January - 21 February 2010)

About the Project

The redevelopment of Peterborough’s city centre is not just a cleaning of its environment; it is essentially a renewal of the commitment to the people who occupy its public realm. To this end John Ealing’s project seeks to generate phases of work that evolves through a series of transactions and transformations creating art works inclusive of the city of Peterborough and its natural environment.

Phase one of the project was the call for people of Peterborough to contribute images of Peterborough to a dedicated website. These photographs of places and events in Peterborough that hold a special memory were collected through a dedicated website and at the museum. Alongside of the images a short text, in relation to the image, was also submitted. These images formed the bulk of the content of the phase two of the project.

Phase two of the project was the collation and design of the received images into a newspaper. The Peterborough Soil newspaper will be widely distributed through out the city in parallel with the project’s installation. A proportion of the newspapers are to be used in phase three of the project.

Phase three of the project is an installation for Peterborough museum. The installation will house two industrial cages accommodating the processes of newspaper distribution and shredding whilst the other will contain a converted compost tumbler that will transform in the ratio of 80% paper to 20% vegetative the newspapers into soil.
This compost will be, both metaphorically and actually, a soil containing the images and texts of Peterborough submitted by people from Peterborough. The ‘living’ installation will house a number of experiments centred around compositional analysis of the constructed soil in order to determine at what point the soil can sustain plant life.

The concluding phase of the project will be the collection of the final soil produced and its insertion into five perforated cylindrical containers. Each of these containers will be placed into the root systems of five mature trees to be planted in St John’s Square. Newling wishes, albeit briefly, to conjoin our sense of place and memory within the complexity of the processes of decomposition that generates compost as nutriments in the soil.
Each tree will have within its carbon growth echoes of people’s response to places and memories from the city in which they will survive and thrive; an ecology of us, nature as a regenerative process.