Future Fruit

In April 2019 Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins became a family, adding Benjamin Baxter-Gittins to their collaborative practice. The word 'ben' is Scots for 'mountain peak'. So when thinking about their responsibilities to Ben and this, their first family residency, they asked themselves 'what does it mean to think like a mountain?' This question, derived from Aldo Leopold's book, A Sand County Almanac(1949), asks us to think from an ecological perspective. It's from this perspective that Jonathan, Sarah and their Huntly collaborators sought to rethink an existing community orchard in response to the current climate and ecological crisis.1

To aid their enquiry Jonathan and Sarah invited Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) – ecologist, educator and visual thinker – to join them in their residency. They asked how Geddes' insights into the evolution of cities might relate to the many interests and needs of all age groups, cultures, demographics, and species in Huntly? Hence the project title, Future Fruit: Rethinking Huntly from a Geddesian Perspective – a synthesis in thought tending towards collective action.2

Following a site visit in February 2019 the artists returned in August for their main residency. At this time they observed, tended and improved access to the orchard, researched the orchard's history, met with local residents to develop a care plan for the orchard, and delivered a series of public engagement events to draw attention to the orchard.

These events introduced Geddes as a mask of learning – a form of civic education through performance.3  They also repositioned the community orchard as a multi-species commons grafted onto Huntly and District Development Trust's Campus for Learning and Play proposal.

Having identified a network of interested parties during the course of their August residency the artists returned regularly between September 2019 to March 2020 to deliver various orchard related events and workshops. They also worked with Town is the Garden to transition the project into a community-led initiative.

To find out more about Huntly's Community Orchard and how you can get involved please check out the Facebook group. The orchard, which includes apples, plums, damsons, and hazelnuts, can be found at The Meadows.

1 The existing orchard is made up of two separate plantings. One established by the artist Norma Hunter through her Bite on the Side project. The other by Networks of Wellbeing.

2 This last sentence appropriates Geddes. The full quotation reads: 'Not every thought takes a form in action; but the psychologist is ever more assured that it at least points thither. With increasing clearness and interests, with increasing synthesis with other thoughts, ideas become emotionalised towards action. Synthesis in thought thus tends to collective action - to Synergy in deed: and Imagination concentrates itself to prefigure, for the Etho-Polity in Synergy, the corresponding Achievement which it may realise.' See, http://ds.cc.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp/~okutsu/GeddesHomepage/Epapers/The%20Notation%20of%20Life_04.5.files/The%20Notation%20of%20Life_0-body.htm – last accessed 06.07.20.

3 Here the artists respond to Geddes' use of masques of learning and apply a similar methodology to a singular Geddesian mask. See, The Masque of Learning (1912) – an online link can be found here:  https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.180972/page/n5/mode/2up – last accessed 06.07.20.

Images: Holly Keasey; Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins