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Image credit: Chen Cannell

Image credit: Chen Cannell

Gathering on tender ground: Women Back to the Land in Sussex

Earlier this month, I hosted a special gathering at the University of Sussex, bringing people together to watch, eat, reflect, create and share conversation around women's journeys into agroecology.

The event marked the culmination of several strands of the project and the launch of two creative outputs: our short film, The Land That Holds Us, and the project zine, Tender Ground. I wanted to create a space where people could encounter the research in different ways, and have time to notice and respond to what it stirred up. 

Watching and listening

We began with a screening of The Land That Holds Us, a short film made as part of the project with co-directors Jo Barker and Holly Black. The film features four women market gardeners from the Sussex Weald and rural mid-Wales: Zoe Proctor of Tir Awen Market Garden, Monmouthshire; Katie Hastings, formerly of Mach Maethlon, Powys; Rosa Farber of Laines Organic Farm, West Sussex; and Collette Haynes of Ashurst Organics, East Sussex. Collette joined us for a Q&A after the screening.

Through their voices and everyday lives, The Land That Holds Us explores the joy, sorrow and contradictions of agroecological work. It attends to the physical and emotional realities of this work, but also to humour, resourcefulness, connection and the different ways people make lives and livelihoods in relation to land.

Watch The Land That Holds Us, the Women Back to the Land short film: https://vimeo.com/1178802360

Food and reflection

Sharing freshly prepared food grown on local organic farms and gardens was an important part of the gathering. Rather than treating the meal as an interval between the more “substantive” parts of the event, it was part of what the evening was trying to do: create time for nourishment, conversation and connection. 

Attendees enjoyed a gourmet buffet made on site by the head chef at Eat Central - the University's in-house caterer - using fresh ingredients sourced from across Sussex, including some of the farms and gardens featured in the film and wider research.  

After the evening meal, we moved from watching and talking towards quieter forms of engagement. A guided reflection invited people to pause with their responses to the film and the wider themes of the project, before translating some of those thoughts and feelings into creative work by unmaking and remaking the project zine, Tender Ground.

"When you eat food together, you know that your bodies and minds are sharing in the most primal and intrinsic of experiences, as part of a living planet. As your bellies fill with the food and nutrition, you grow together into an ecosystem." (Reflective writing excerpt, anonymous attendee)

Creative play

Tender Ground explores inequalities around gender, class and race, as well as precarity, access to land and resources, the strain of agricultural work, and questions about who is able to enter and remain within agroecology. Many of the issues at the centre of the Women Back to the Land project are not straightforward or comfortable ones.

But the stories gathered in its pages are not only stories of difficulty. Tender Ground also holds space for the joy, commitment, creativity and tenacity that run alongside those challenges. Unmaking and remaking the zine gave us an opportunity to sit with some of these tensions and explore them in a more affective, embodied way.

The resulting pieces were varied, thoughtful, playful and beautiful. Together, they offer another perspective on the questions the research has been asking: one shaped not only by the researcher or the women who participated in the original study, but also by people encountering their stories for the first time.

Read and download Tender Ground, the project zine: https://works.hcommons.org/records/nbc6r-wfa97

Exhibition

The Sussex gathering followed an earlier event in Brecon, Wales, where participants took part in a similar process. I have now brought the artworks from both gatherings together in an online gallery, allowing these responses to sit alongside one another and extending something of the collective experience beyond the rooms in which the events took place.

Explore the artwork created at the Brecon and Sussex gatherings: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjD5Ueq

See more images and artwork from the project on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ashwolf_panfire/

Thank you and goodbye

I want to say a final thank you to everyone who has shared their stories, time, knowledge and creativity with me over the past few years, and to everyone who has supported, challenged and encouraged the project along the way. It has been a privilege to travel alongside so many women as they have found their own ways of making lives and livelihoods in relation to land.

Although the formal Women Back to the Land project is drawing to a close, its outputs are still available online.

Read a paper on gendered, classed and racialised identities in UK agroecology: https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2026.2652039 

For now, I’ll leave the project here – with the film, the zine, the artworks, and the many conversations and connections that have grown around them. I hope they continue to find audiences, prompt further conversations, and perhaps take root in places and ways we cannot yet know. 

With thanks,

Rachael

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