Renowned performance artist Richard Layzell addresses a love letter to Stroud’s car parks this January, uncovering the ‘value of mush’ for local wildlife in piles of soggy leaves and unswept hidden corners. There’s nothing quite like mush.
From 18–24 January, London-based performer Richard Layzell will be artist-in-residence at SVA. Each day he will be roaming around one of Stroud’s car parks, revealing the hidden mysteries and biodiversities of these neglected places and releasing photos, videos and audio on Instagram and Facebook. Follow his daily adventures and learn about how Stroud’s very own mushy piles of leaves are part of a complex web of ecology, not just an inconvenient heap to be swept up. Layzell’s residency continues his sixteen-year relationship with SVA and is part of his project The Naming, in which he works with maverick environmentalist Kino Paxton to challenge the ways we distance ourselves from aspects of the natural world by categorising and naming things.
Layzell’s relationship with SVA goes back to 2004, when he was resident artist for their first major building development in John Street. He worked with Jo Leahy, Neil Walker and architect Simon Jones on a small commission that he spun out until 2008, forming a strong attachment to SVA and to Stroud. Layzell returned to Stroud in 2009 to show his site-specific commission The Manifestation in the gallery and staircases of SVA, working then with his fictional collaborator Tania Koswycz.
Since 2018, Layzell has been working with Kino Paxton on The Naming, an action research project that has taken him from the tidal reach of the River Avon to the highways of Seoul, via the misspelled shopping malls of Canada and the exquisite song of the pied butcherbird in Australia. Layzell and Paxton take a playful and intuitive approach to a subject that is hugely important to them: Deep ecology, an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living things regardless of their seeming usefulness to human beings.
There’s nothing like mush. Look out for his Instagram and Facebook postings from January 18th.
