Fallow Land centres around four artist residencies (Oct 24 to May 25) creating a series of interdisciplinary place-centred projects across working and post-agricultural lands involving Portobello, Craigentinny and Jedburgh culminating in an exhibition at Mote102 Leith Edinburgh (9-17 May 2025) and new journal publication: Fallow Land produced by Rosy Naylor and Tom Jeffreys.
Over a period of six months, each artist has explored a number of interpretations of fallow: from soil health and soil conductivity to community and marine farming initiatives, from fallow processes like tilling to rested land and lands left behind untended due to forced exile.
The project is curated by Rosy Naylor, with scientific support for the ‘Residue’ residency (artist Hanna Paniutsich), from Professor Larissa Naylor, geomorphologist from University of Glasgow who has a specific knowledge experience relating to Seafield and the legacy of waste for the coastal zone. Across the project we have also been working with the two MSc Earth Futures student placements, Emma West and Liqin Peng creating an ‘Inquiry’ series, available to see via our Instagram feed.
About the artist projects
Fallow Land, Fallow Communities James Wyness
As part of his Fallow Land, Fallow Communities residency James Wyness has spent slow time over the last six months observing, researching and documenting patterns of land use in two fallow fields situated within the hinterland of Jedburgh. These arable fields have been set aside from food production for soil regeneration. Through collected sound, performative video and text, his installation Set Aside at Mote102 (May 2025) explores ideas of ruralism and rights of land ownership, considering access and our wider relationships to agricultural land, involving:
Audio: environmental multi-channel sound recorded at Hunt Knowes, a stubble field set aside as part of a winter stubble scheme to encourage birds, later ploughed and sown with spring barley.
Video: a series of performative movements carried out and filmed at Western Muir, a field set aside for two year short term grass. The short moving image clips and loops develop The Landowner project, a series in which Wyness plays the part of a Borders landowner carrying out specific actions in the environment.
Text: gerunds (‘-ing’ words) relating to the assumed activities of a Borders landowner; agricultural terms; and planting map of fields around Hunthill above Jedburgh.
Simultaneously during his residency, Wyness has initiated a community growing food initiative around the town of Jedburgh, Get Jed Fed, exploring the complexity of relationships between ownership and custodianship of public green space and between food growing in both town and county.
James Wyness is a multi-media artist based in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. He works primarily with sound and lens-based media, producing a range of work from documentary, archival and socially engaged processes to more experimental investigations. His current research converges on a long-term examination of social and environmental aspects of Jedburgh, the river and its basin. Past work has included the sonification of climate change data and the sonic documentation of Seville’s Holy Week Processions.
Shore Hunt Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose
Their residency ‘Shore Hunt’ considers the shore as fallow land, functioning as testing grounds for alternative realities, economies and borders. A shore is a space where margins and borders expand, where diasporic, migratory and disabled bodies can change the process of representation itself.
As part of Fallow Land, they create a community ‘shore’ cultivating ‘native’ oyster leaf plants (mertensia maritima) situated on Portobello Promenade, an installation Récif d’huîtres (oyster reef) containing 50 handmade porcelain oyster shells made in collaboration with ceramist Anna Samson (Hoya Ceramic) forming their installation at Mote102 (May 2025), and a performance as part of the Art Walk Porty Festival (September 2025). These interventions build on intersectional research between critical race, disability and decolonial studies, and site-specific research in Mauritius and Scotland, highlighting the role of women across empires – connecting stories from shore to shore.
The work also takes inspiration from a group of fisherwomen of coastal Maharashtra (Western India), who farm oysters from bamboo structures behind their creek, together with the current reintroduction of oyster beds into the Forth (once the largest oyster farming site across Europe).
Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose are mixed and disabled visual artists, collaborators, partners and carers. Their transdisciplinary practice explores the untold histories of indentured immigration, the fallibility of memory, and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. Through their continuous engagement with vanishing or vanquished historical memory and archives, they investigate the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Exploring memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, empathy and solidarity, their work combines the past, present and future with poetry, experimenting with the timelessness of certain symbols, intercultural gestures, globalisation and technologies.
Residue Hanna Paniutsich
Hanna during her residency Residue has explored the area of Craigentinny, a land once a moorland, an irrigated meadow and a common sewer system. The irrigation system concentrated around the production of grass for animal feed and was connected to the production of milk, where once the Fillyside Dairy was located. Around the time of the Second World War it was also a military camp, later demolished to make way for a golf course that currently occupies this area of land near to Edinburgh’s north eastern coast at Seafield.
Such a history of the land prompted Hanna to consider soil health and how contamination and fertility are connected. Measuring the electrical conductivity of soil – along with humidity and temperature data – is one of the vital parameters offering insights into soil health.
Her installation at Mote102 (May 2025) includes: Your Body and the Ground which measures the voltage potential difference between our bodies and the ground, using a copper plate connected to a patch of soil outside the gallery. This artwork explores the grounding properties of earth and the possibility of electricity to be discharged into the soil, something also explored in ‘electroculture’ gardening, where people use metal “antennae” and wires to draw ambient electricity into the soil for use as plant fertiliser.
Hanna Paniutsich is a multimedia artist and researcher based in Glasgow (b. Minsk, Belarus) whose practice is heavily informed by scientific research within the fields of ecology, chemistry, biology and emergent technologies. She navigates different bio materials, satellite imagery, data and coding languages to form a range of multimedia installations, moving image and written works. Recent projects have focussed on subjects of radioactivity, in particular the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, exploring radiation, pollution and contaminated ground.
Homelands left behind Henna Asikainen
Within her residency Henna met with a group of Syrian older women with farming backgrounds who had arrived in Scotland as refugees following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. For those who had been forcibly displaced, the concept of fallow land carried profound resonances. Their longing was woven into stories of home, livestock, orchards and olive trees destroyed, and their own lands, now far away from the soil they once tilled. Fallow land suggests an eventual return, a season of restoration. But what if return is denied? Homeland, not abandoned by choice, but rendered untended by forced exile – existing in a state of suspended potential in the minds of those displaced. Like a fallow field, not barren but waiting – could a homeland held in memory still hold the possibility of renewal? And if leaving land fallow is an act of restoration, then what is being restored—the land itself, or the people who still carry it within them?
Henna’s installation at Mote102 (May 2025) involves two works:
Roots and Soil – An uprooted young sycamore tree, displaced by commercial forest clearing. Its exposed roots carry traces of the soil it once held, embodying both loss and resilience. ‘Roots and Soil’ reflects on the fragile interdependence between land and life, inviting contemplation on what it means to be uprooted—both for the tree and for those whose lives are similarly disrupted by forces beyond their control.
We Lived from Our Cherry Orchards but They Are All Cut Down Now – A felled cherry tree stands as a silent witness to loss and resilience. Thin strips of red birch bark, inscribed with words from women who have experienced forced displacement, are hung from its branches—like echoes of voices… These inscriptions speak of orchards destroyed, land seized and abandoned, and livelihoods lost. Cherry, walnut, and pistachio trees once flourished, sustaining communities now uprooted. Yet amidst the loss and ravaged landscape there is space for hope and renewal—the land, though scarred, waits patiently…
Henna Asikainen is a multidisciplinary, socially engaged artist, whose work questions human relationships with nature, and the complex social and ecological issues that emerge. Many of Asikainen’s recent projects have been built around communal experiences within different landscapes and have examined issues including migration, climate justice and unequal access to nature. Her work consistently advocates for a philosophy of friendship and radical hospitality.
Latest Journal Publication: Fallow Land, priced £5
Read more about the four residencies together with articles from curator Rosy Naylor, writer Tom Jeffreys, coastal specialist Larissa Naylor and researcher Anna-Katharina Laboissière in our latest journal publication: Issue 3: Fallow Land.
52pp including cover