Intervention and Renewal (2024)

Exhibitions:
Royal Photographic Society, Bristol, 3 Apr–22 Jun 2025 (We Feed the UK group show)
Abbot Hall, Kendal, 28 Sep–28 Dec 2024 · Extended to 19 Apr 2025
Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 8 Feb–31 Mar 2024

Strickley is the Robinson family's 300-acre organic farm near Kendal. With Intervention and Rewewal, I showcase their dedication to biodiversity as they manage extensive species-rich hedgerows and rewild woodlands and wetlands. I also comment on the tension between environmental and economic incentives on a working farm. This is important because it mirrors a challenge we all now face. Intervention and Renewal was commissioned by the Gaia Foundation and Open Eye Gallery as part of We Feed the UK, a major national arts project that celebrates sustainable food production practices. With support from Lakeland Arts it was also exhibited in Cumbria, close to where it was made.

Humans intervene to influence outcomes. Early agrarian societies grew crops in fertile floodplains to increase their harvests. Their actions were just that: interventions. Since the industrial era, it is this same tendency that has led to maximising agricultural yields through techno-scientific interventions. Characterised by intensive animal farming, monoculture, pesticides, and synthetic fertilisers, this approach has also impoverished soil, increased pollutants, and contributed to a rapid decline in biodiversity.

It is impossible to imagine a society where humans do not alter their environment. The question is therefore not whether to intervene, but how and to what extent? In Getting Along with Nature, Wendell Berry writes that if humans “choose to make too great a difference, they diminish nature, and narrow their subsequent choices; ultimately, they diminish or destroy themselves.”

Forward-thinking farmers recognise this danger and work with nature to provide for their and our livelihoods. Three generations of the Robinson family work at Strickley, their organic dairy farm in Cumbria. There they also manage kilometres of species-rich hedgerows and are actively rewilding woodlands and wetlands. The habitats they create increase biodiversity by sustaining interdependent communities of microorganisms, plants, and animals. This is aided by the absence of pesticides and inorganic fertilisers as surveys of the stream that runs through the farm show. Its clean water supports growing numbers of arthropods, crustaceans, fish, and mammals.

By balancing intervention and renewal, the Robinsons embrace a new sensibility that reconciles economic viability and environmental sustainability. As a family farm with a long history (they have been exhibiting at the local agricultural show for 150 years), this proactive approach is a credible example to their peers. It can also serve as a model to society at large.

***

Intervention and Renewal was first exhibited at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool in February and March 2024. It was also featured in Issue 24 of Tilt, Open Eye Gallery's in-house zine.

Through support by Lakeland Arts and Open Eye Gallery, Intervention and Renewal was also shown at Abbot Hall, Kendal from September to December 2024. The exhibition included photographs by students from Queen Katherine School, who had visited Strickley farm in response to the project.