Miche Fabre Lewin
Born in Zimbabwe, Miche came to the UK in 1980. Her work as a studio artist
“Art offers me a space of potential and becoming. It is a threshold place to cultivate my instinctual, emotional and embodied capacity to be living authentically in presence - embracing the political and the sacred, the ancestral and archetypal humanness of life on sentient Earth. With the matter and metaphor of living processes I am in a continuous enquiry into ‘what is a life?’, the interrogating of white racialised culture, the re-membering that we dwell in a radical belonging with nature. For me being an artist guides me in gratitude, respect, and the courage to challenge oppression, to seek to heal my own wounds and to honour the sacred in the everyday.”
Flora Gathorne- Hardy
Flora’s life began in rural Suffolk, England – a region that gifted her a deep love of land. Her art-making work explores of forgotten gestures and practices that are receptive to and respectful of the animate life of the land. Daily actions of water care, bee guardianship, tending plants, scything inspire performative actions and drawings as an intuitive body language that reveals the subtle and reciprocal relationships between our human lives and the life of place.
“My life and art evolve within geographies of connection. For me, making art is fundamentally an experience of responding with the intelligences and energies of people, other sentient beings and those of the land with its layered memories. These experiences come through my mind, hands, dreams, sounds, sensations, conversations, all expressed as a movement of co-making and co-thinking through drawing, writing, performance, and designing. Art is a way of being that allows me to become more fully present to life as an interconnected whole, enhancing my ability to interact in ways that add to the diversity of expression and habitat.”
The collaboration between Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy began in 2010 as a two-day inquiry. What emerged was Everything is Here - a large-scale artwork that combined writing - ‘It’s Food – It’s Land’, ‘New Rhythms’ – imagery and drawings that together interwove their different and complementary artistic practices.