Cambridge Sustainability Residency – Growth and Insulation (2016)
The word Grow emerged directly from the traces of everyday life.
Created outdoors during the Cambridge Sustainability Residency in 2016, the installation was composed entirely of fruit peels collected after my own meals and arranged on the grass to spell a single word: GROW.
What had completed one cycle immediately became the beginning of another.
The discarded peel—often perceived as waste—revealed itself as nourishment, gradually returning to the soil through decomposition and becoming part of an endless ecological exchange. Growth is never an isolated event; it is born from transformation.
The work embraces the quiet intelligence of natural cycles, where nothing truly disappears. Decay is not the opposite of life but one of its most generous expressions. Every ending feeds another beginning.
Installed directly on the earth, the piece was intentionally ephemeral. Rain, insects, wind and microorganisms slowly dissolved the letters until the artwork itself became fertile ground.
The installation existed only for the time that nature allowed it to exist.
“Grow” is therefore less a word than an invitation: to cultivate patience instead of consumption, regeneration instead of accumulation, and to recognise that the most sustainable gesture may simply be to return what we have borrowed from the Earth.