As a commons, and as a creative ecology, the Food Forest Studio is meant to explore ecological dynamics of public and private property in the rural context. To this end, the Food Forest Studio is a site for eco-arts experimentation, and demonstration. I use permaculture and bio-intensive techniques such as bioswales, incoporate layers of a food forest, and have integrated plantings of beneficials, medicinals, edibles. Rather than having one plant crop per row, plants are mixed together based on how they can help one another through nutrients, structure, or resistance to pests. This living studio is completed by dwarf pear, plum, cherry and apple trees, hawthorns and crabapples. Visitors encounter an aesthetic paradigm that emphasizes process, relationship, life. My intentions with this space are many, but as a member of the Guerrilla Grafters, I experiment with fruit tree grafting, and imagine possibilities for rural guerrilla food forestry. The Food Forest Studio is located outside Schupf Art Center studios in Hamilton, NY.
The Food Forest Studio is also a part of an emerging Food Forest Network in Central New York, a collaboration with Elodie Fourquet, Brynn Hatton, Lakshmi Luthra, and Dawn Weleski where resources and labor are shared across sites; and HOT COMPOST! an emerging experimental art project with Hatton, Fourquet and Weleski that combines core body strengthening exercises with the contemplation of rapid and radical decomposition, transformation, and the poetics of the rotten.
Photographs by Margaretha Haughwout and 2021/22 Eco-Art Assistant and Designer Leila Ribeiro
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