This work was developed in collaboration with Bronislaw Szerszynski of the Department of Sociology and the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), Lancaster University.

Synthia II (code / soil / life) consists of a soil constructed by shredding Craig Venter’s synthetic life form ‘Synthia’ and blending it with vegetable matter grown in the ‘root zone’ land outside of our house. The soil was constructed over an 18 day period that deployed a closeness of observation and experimentation in order to convert 634 pages of code and text into a material that could sustain life. The constructed soil, hopefully, will enable the growth of a Moringa Oleifera (miracle tree). These trees are amongst the most versatile trees in the world.

The work records an experimentation that is a relationship of meaning and materiality constructing, cultivating and reviewing a poetics of responsibility. It is a relationship that advocates an intelligent ecology based on values that are immanent in the complex workings of nature.

Venter’s Synthia seems at odds to a social ecology, in a state of co-creation with the natural environment. The attempt to grow a Moringa Oleifera tree in a soil largely constructed from Venter’s code is a renewing of the vital need for a co-creation between the natural environment and us. Synthia II is a permanent work commissioned by Lancaster University.

The soil is constructed from the following documents relating to Craig Venter’s creation of a synthetic life form, Synthia (Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0):
1. The article in Science where Venter published the news that he’d
created a synthetic life form in May - 12 pages
2. The supporting online material for that - 29 pages
3. The print out of the entire Synthia genome - 279 pages
4. The supporting files explaining what all the genes are - 314 pages
Total text = 634 pages
+ vegetable matter as approximately 20% of the soil composition

I have been collecting and pressing many leaves and flowers from the Root Zone site. These pressings will then be placed into all the books in the local history section of the local library in Sherwood. Sherwood library has a comprehensive section on local history. I will be placing one or two of the pressing into each book. I have on a few occasions been reading a book and come across a pressed flower or leaf and know that it is a strange and oddly personal encounter.

From early July people taking out local history books will come across these delicate, resonant markers. I am curious if the pressed leaves will be removed or left in place.

Root Zone continues my work on the relationship between the natural environment and me; a relationship of meaning and materiality that constructs, cultivates and reviews a poetics of responsibility. It is a relationship that advocates an intelligent ecology based on values that are immanent in the complex workings of nature. Between ethics, ecology and aesthetics I hope for my work to find a new ground in a generative programme of intensive care to influence our responsibilities as gardeners of the public domain.

In recent years great attention has been paid to the complex dynamics of ecological systems and how, in practice, we can think in terms of urban, social, political and even cultural ecologies. My soil works are situated on this shared ground of possibility, where the artificial distinction between nature and culture will no longer make sense. Seeing Nature as both affect and effect, tied into the multiple ecologies of humanity, we can re-evaluate its transformative potential in the complex workings of everyday life. A social ecology, in a state of co-creation with the natural environment, could provide the practical grounds for addressing the question of how to properly constitute the well being of contemporary life.

The Root Zone project is the cultivation of the area of land under the tree that is outside of our house. Once the soil had been prepared I planted numerous herbs and strawberry plants in the zone. The affect on people living local has been very positive with people harvesting herbs and taking cuttings.

Root Zone is a work that gives me the opportunity to grow and harvest plants in a public space. These plants are used in particular projects. Currently the harvesting of these plants is involved in both Local History and Synthia II projects. Each project uses the zone as a harvesting area for material and thought.

Root Zone will continue to be cultivated as a space for future transaction, works and thoughts.

Natural history is a series of small sculptures that were formed during the Peterborough Soil installation (January – February 2010). Each of nine small spheres was taken out of the compost tumbler over a period of eight weeks, one per week. The series nine spheres reflect the transition from paper text to soil. These are the first of a number of sculptural works that form from moulding the soils I construct.

For many years now I have been making works that investigate material transformations that evolve through processes that weave in and out of transactions with places, people and, more recently, with other living entities. The Lemon Tree continues this thread of expression and research.

The Lemon Tree is both a singular and distinct work and the final phase of the Noah laboratory project.

The Noah Laboratory project emerged out of a residency at The Collection Studio, Lincoln, from January to April 2008. During the residency I conducted and documented a series of transactions with members of public in the High Street. These centred on a set of questions, and a number of gifted objects, reflecting on man’s relationship to nature. The project evolved from my experience of travelling each day by train through the Lincolnshire landscape.

Moving through the landscape from Nottingham to Lincoln was a time of reflection. The big skies and the ever changing landscape often constructed from agricultural work and processes acted as a generator of thought for my residency. It was during one these many journeys that I began to realise that the final phase of the ‘Noah Laboratory’ was to configure a work that, actually and symbolically constructs a soil from both my essay ‘from my garden’ and from the images of the transactions I had been doing in the high street of Lincoln. In this manner, the paper becomes both a reflection on the construction and meaning of such a soil and the principal component of it.

Subsequent to the residency I collected the images and my writings in a newspaper which was distributed by volunteers around Lincoln and Nottingham during the exhibition with the discarded papers being collected and returned to the gallery for recycling. The installation in the gallery, running from January 31st to March 3rd 2009, progressively turn pre-read copies of the paper to compost, creating a changing experience for visitors as the project continues. This process served to extend the reach of the project, linking the sites of the residency back to the gallery, and bring it full circle as the work produced is returned to earth. The resulting unique soil, containing ideas and images that both reflected and integrated the processes of the project consisted of some 85% paper.

The final phase of the project was to select a plant to grow in the soil. The plant, growing in the constructed soil, would be presented to the Collection as a permanent art work. The plant was a lemon tree.

On the afternoon of the 24th of March I had been in a design meeting with Jonathan Casciani, and mentioned that I was considering a lemon tree as the plant to grow in the Noah Laboratory soil. Later that evening I received an unexpected call from Jonathan who was shopping at Homebase and had found a lemon tree. It was between two and three feet high with two fairly ripe lemons hanging from it. We were surprised at how easy it was to purchase a ‘readymade’ lemon tree from a DIY store, imagining it to be resident in the more exotic climes of the Mediterranean.

After a moment’s thought, I asked Jonathan to buy the tree, the economic exchange providing the basis for a new and more fertile ground of artistic and ecological value. After a 12 month period of learning about the relationship between The Lemon Tree and Me I have presented this ‘living composition’ to the Lincoln Collection as a permanent work.

Later in 2010 I hope to publish the book The Lemon Tree and Me. This book is a written and visual account of this intense period of time (March 25th 2009 – March 25th 2010) that records the relationship between The Lemon Tree & Me; a relationship of meaning and materiality that constructs, cultivates and reviews a poetics of responsibility invoking an intelligent ecology based on values which are immanent in the complex workings of nature.

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.

‘Stamping Uncertainty’
Worcester Cathedral, The Chapter House
7-29 November 2009

Questions found in hymns:
exploring the nature of doubt and the struggle for faith

This installation in the Chapter House of Worcester Cathedral explores the questions which are asked in hymns. On the stone benches all around the Chapter House will be lecterns, one for each question that John Newling found, each of which testifies to our uncertainty. It explores the nature of doubt and the struggle for faith that is expressed in the Church’s hymn book.

Hymns are traditionally seen as proclamations of religious certainty, a vocal manifestation of complete faith. Newling, however, has concentrated on the surprising number of questions and doubts contained within them.

Each lectern contains a rubber stamp and ink pad; and a book containing one page with the question from one hymn stamped upon it. Stamping onto paper is normally seen as an expression of bureaucratic certainty, an absolute truth, thus by subverting their use Newling has succinctly created a metaphor for two thousand years of spiritual doubt.

Previously venued at Canterbury and Carlisle Cathedrals, amongst other places, it has been specially adapted for the Chapter House here at Worcester.

The Reverend Canon Dr Georgina Byrne, Residentiary Canon comments: “A living faith is a faith that is unafraid to ask difficult questions. From the agonised ‘why’ in the Psalms of the Old Testament through ‘doubting Thomas’ in the New Testament right up to the ethical dilemmas in our own time, Christians have always wrestled with matters of life and faith. This remarkable installation reveals some of the many questions embedded in our hymns, and in doing so reminds us that, even in the end, the very heart of our faith lies in the great mystery we call God.”

12:00am Wed, 16th Sep 2009 - 12:00am Sun, 18th Oct 2009

John Newling will be collecting and copying key documents relating to the different history of spaces adjacent to the River Trent and the industrial wastelands of Nottingham which have an emphasis on changing values and shifting architectural or ground use. This collection of documents will be shredded and transformed into soil. Using a laboratory provided by Bio City, the artist will then conduct a number of experiments. In this first phase of the project the laboratory will house a hydroponics system that endeavours to grow Beech trees.

Newling hopes to open up the ‘historic situation’ of material culture, evolving his project through a series of vital conversations between nature, environment and society.

In October 2008 John Newling conducted a survey with the Wellcome Collection to find out ‘What people do to make themselves feel better’. (See ‘Make a Piano in Spain project’). The findings were then reconfigured to present a poetic insight into 21st century self medication.

This year the information has been represented in the form of tabloid Newspaper. The subversive newspaper is being distributed for free in the busy commercial district on the Euston Road area of London and the Frieze Art fair.

Distribution will be on 14 - 15 October 2009.

The Noah Laboratory (constructing soil)

Venue:The Collection, Lincoln
Year: 2009
Commissioner: The Collection, Lincoln
Project Manager: Lesley Farrell (curator)
Mode: Installation
Commissioner: The Collection, Lincoln

Notes:

John Newling was Artist in Residence at The Collection Studio from January to April 2008. The Noah Laboratory is the final production process and installation of the project initiated during this period and developed throughout 2008. Over the course of a month the gallery will form the central distribution hub and recycling point for a newspaper containing the images and writings generated from the residency and will, through the installation, endeavour to transform the some of the papers into soil. This installation is the practical and conceptual completion of ‘The Noah Laboratory’ and brings it fully to a public audience both through the paper and the installation itself. It creates a dialogue between the sites of the residency, The Collection’s permanent exhibits and archives of geological artefacts and social history, and the contemporary art spaces and collections of the museum. From January to March 2008 Newling began to make notes on the ways and means we use to connect with our natural environment. Then, from March to September 2008 he gathered these notes and started to draw together some of the reflections. These notes and reflections eventually became the ‘From my garden’ essay that acts as a key text in the newspaper. The final phase of the Noah Laboratory configures a work that, actually and symbolically constructs a soil from both the essay ‘From My Garden’ and the images of the transactions. A core element of the soil is a newspaper that will be mainly distributed on the Lincoln High Street and on the train between Nottingham and Lincoln. A proportion of the papers are shredded and become a physical part of the soil that will be constructed in the gallery. In this manner, the text and images are both a reflection on the construction and meaning of such a soil and the principal component of it. The Noah laboratory endeavors to achieve this through the material transformations that happen within the installation.