groundwork residency 2025: fluid earth

Applications are open for Fluid Earth, the title of GroundWork Gallery’s fifth annual artist residency and exhibition programme for 2025. It builds on our track-record of environmental art residencies which have taken a strongly inter-disciplinary approach. We welcome broad and imaginative approaches to the subject.

Extractivism: the overarching theme

The overall concept for the residency up till now has been about extraction and extractivism: the removal of resources from the earth, whether natural or otherwise.

Extractivism describes an overarching attitude which legitimises removal as a default, as opposed to replenishing resources or thinking in terms of regeneration. This is often accompanied by an assumption that extraction is a permissible exercise without full consideration of the longer-term implications for sustainability, for pollution, or of ownership of the materials or environments affected.

The artists in residence have to date taken rigorous perspectives. They have been drawing attention to overconsumption and using resources with enormous sensitivity. They have highlighted little-known practices and properties of materials, minimizing or making effective use of waste products. Results of their work can be seen in the exhibition pages since 2020, the more recent ones being The Ground Beneath Our Feet, 2023 and Ground Up, 2024. Ground Water is also part of that theme.