RP: This feels so distant now, but aside from my MFA, it's the way I met most of the people I know. My 2007 co-founders, Kate and Amanda, were friends from CSM and secondary school, I introduced them and we all decided to put on shows in what was then a squat, which we turned legal, with all the various communities that made up that Venn diagram. At first it was joyfully amateurish and chaotic and we learnt very fast how to improve. Shows by friends, friends of friends, people we looked up to, and then further afield. An ever increasing circle. With each new production (the years of the Live TV series were great) it kept scaling up. After a few years and a few buildings later, once there was Arts Council funding, I left.

Truthfully I found curating too hard, and too stressful, the pace of the newness, but I’m so glad that it continues today and I love seeing it grow and change from the outside. I’m glad projects like this exist and I really believe in artist run spaces and self organising because I know how valuable it is to grow in something alongside people. Some very lasting relationships happen in this way, and it's a history, London wide, artist project wide, that I’m really proud to have been a part of.

RP: That show, as many do, started with one object which becomes a storytelling device to explore material culture. In that instance, I saw a product on instagram - a curved tile designed by a Dutch company, which made covering 3D objects in seamless tiles a reality, seemingly bringing to life the terrifying vision of Superstudio’s continuous monument - the pristine and clinical whiteness of earth made both ideal and then also scary, the banal horror of white supremacy in Europe - though that was in my mind, it’s barely visible in the work.

I wrote a hasty and lengthy fan mail in admiration of their maths and engineering as an in, having tried to once make this exact thing myself before and failed so badly. I was invited to document the factory, which was as high end as you’d expect a Dutch design firm to be. Attractive people making slick products, to cool music and a backdrop of laughter and shared meals, a really nice place to work.

The whitest most plastic clay comes from the Bovey Basin, near Newton Abbot. I think this is where my interest in eating clay alongside wild food and foraging took hold too, that the mouth or teeth can be a tool for research, that you can taste chemistry. Part 3 would be the unmade sequel. When the waste goes to the hardcore contractor who surface roads. Objects made from earth, designed to cover the earth becoming road rubble or hardcore. I think the (also colonial) history of road-making as a way of claiming territory and extraction is something I’d be up for interrogating also. 

RP: Seems impossible now, but combining the fee with another project with The Science Gallery myself and Lori E Allen went to visit a volcano in Ethiopia to try and study geology as a way of listening to the biochemistry of the earth. Lori trained as an archaeologist (as well as working in sound and video) and told me about the hominid history of the region - that this is where the bones of ‘Lucy’ were found, where the human species originated and migrated from, where land masses met.

We went on an organised tour - you can’t visit without a military escort, because it’s a contested border, and this was safer, easier, cheaper, more accessible and fun and informative with a guide, and then friend, Kibreab Tesfu. We saw lava lakes, salt lakes, potash mines, pools of sulphuric acid - the colours were dizzying and magical. We walked through these biblical level valleys of salt, dykes visiting dykes. Being with other tourists made us look a different kind of ridiculous. There was no shoot, we just documented on the fly. I’ve never stood on so many different land formations in one place. The reason it looks like this is new land is spewing up where the tectonic plates diverge, and minerals in the mantle are all new and unstable, alchemy in progress.

I planned 3 events and a show. They were kind of weird and imperfect, bordering on embarrassing, like this lecture format event, titled Tesselation. I’m grateful to Jane Scarth, who I worked really closely with, for allowing that; it was valuable to me to let it hang out a bit, be a bit messy, and to invest in writing was a really amazing thing to do, given that I think of my work as research or sculpture or video mainly. It was a vote of confidence that I’m really grateful for. I spent a lot of time in libraries in the royal societies and it made me really acutely aware of who gets access to research time, books, archives… but also the knowledge that if you have the time, you can also seek them out for free if you’re interested enough. Places that are closed can be cracked open. 

RP: Yes we do have this in common, the ways in which organic contaminations occur. And questions around naming. I love that as soon as you look into the biology of plants they affirm, echo and validate every possible way of being and of growing and changing, and of hybridity, symbiosis, sexuality and gender. They were here before us and will for sure outlive us. They give us everything we need. Food, medicine, shelter, clothing, ritual, and that’s without all the spices-are-literally-money stuff.

I think it’s pretty clear now that plants, houseplants especially if you don’t have access to outdoors space, are a really good companion species to live alongside, to their pace. I’ve been spoiled with south facing windows! At one point when I had more plants than space, I read a migraine study which said green light wavelengths are the least likely to trigger pain. Perhaps I instinctively gave myself not only something to look after and love and learn from but also a sort of medicine by way of green filtered light. I had been focusing for a good few years on the histories of cash crops, but this last year I’ve been drawn to weeds.

RP: I started researching and presenting art work actively in relation to plants and their place in building and upholding colonial wealth in 2015 with a film called India Rubber. This interest in the ecology, politics and economic history of the rubber plant and others was extended into work on a project about cash crops and their material contribution and its intertwined history of capitalist colonialist extractivism and exploitative monoculture plantations, with the Serpentine a couple of years ago where a selection of some of the most notable economic plants with mostly very violent stories, like cotton, coffee, tobacco and black pepper, were shown alongside the products made from their labour.

This event really didn't end that process, there's so much unpacking to do of all the movement of natural resources, sacred knowledge, humans and plants entangled, land appropriated, names and lives lost. I’m still learning a lot.

The festival itself- Blak Outside 2020, a Black led space for community workshops, talks and a sliding scale plant sale to decolonise the garden and to celebrate being proudly and safely blak outside. There were so many people involved each with such valuable contributions that it would be difficult to acknowledge and thank them all here, but the garden design by Farouk Agoro and the illustration and identity by Blk Moody Boi in collaboration with Carole were really integral, as were the speakers and workshop leaders, and everyone who helped organise screenings, plants to sell (thanks Eddie Pile) and food. A big South London effort.

The event’s name was under Carole’s name and continues her practice of walking, beekeeping, public realm and architecture work and her ongoing experiences of Black history, music, food and culture, and her Ghanain and Jamaican heritage. Recently Carole was involved in co-writing an open letter to various horticulture institutions to challenge them on their actions towards meaningful diversity. 

AF: Ok, as this conversation is for QUEERCIRCLE and it’s a word I’ve wrestled with, let’s talk about the word 'queer,' how do you deal with it and what does it mean to you?

RP: I like it, to be honest, I use the word queer very comfortably, its the best linguistic home for me I’ve found so far. I’m lucky enough to have never really been in any danger using it, and I’m sure that’s sure why it’s even possible to be comfortable. Sometimes, depending who the audience is, I might use any of the other words interchangeably (often to negate something I don't like). But queer works for a range of my experiences of sexuality and gender because its still very open and subject to change. Beyond that, queer politics, queer theory, queer as refusal- as NOT certain things just make sense to me.

There are things I am, but mainly there are things I am not, so I’m queer first, as a no thank you to much of the rest of it. I identify with wrestling with it more as a question in making things- how present to make my own identity politics. I’m sure you get this, but you know when you’re invited to present work/ yourself based on your identity and feel a flattening, like ‘hmmm thank you, but my work is about soil or whatever, so why?’ and perhaps that naming seeps in for the benefit of others or perhaps it’s for myself, I can’t always tell. Sometimes, doors are opened as ‘diversity’, which feels sad, because I think of the structures of privilege, and who continues to miss out.

I have just moved out of London. It’s taken 18 years of working in art there to be both stable enough to leave it but also to really question London-centrism and although in many ways, it’s the only place I’ve felt at home, I’m really up for a new chapter, swap the indoor forest for an allotment, more rural space - very much a privilege and intended as a shift of focus, a cheaper life, less pressure to work. I’ve got rid of a lot of physical objects that have probably been bogging me down and that is very freeing, mentally. Anything for a lighter existence, especially given events lately. Quiet space is a priority in order to do some moving on and set better priorities, make better decisions, get more involved with things I believe in, say no to those I don’t. I’m really happy to be able to go somewhere new and grateful to have a goal for weathering the next part.