YARD WORK: A Situated Intervention in Place, Plant, and Craft
Yard Work is a place-based workshop combining craft, ecological awareness, and community building. linkedin.com/in/lesley-roberts-b5a11413
@material_encounters.art
The intent is to mend and transform my neighborhood's relationship with place, with the plants and animals and possibilities of what lives here. Created as a small-scale, multidisciplinary sidewalk gathering, the workshop invites us to craft artefacts with the plant material in our front yards, while welcoming neighbors and passers-by to share stories, talk about the history of our neighborhood, what was grown here, and what might be possible moving forward. Modeled on mending circles, Yard Work creates informal space for skill exchange, collective making, and relationship building in an intimate and unexpected environment [i.e., invitational space]. The improvisational nature of the sidewalk opens the possibility to unguarded, extemporaneous storytelling. I plan to elicit stories and engage in dialogue that might both remind community members of the richness of our land while also inspiring them to think differently about what this soil might produce and support: relationships, food, fiber. We might re-imagine "yard work" as the craft of making neighborhood.
Future design outputs may include material samples, toolkits, participatory frameworks, and exhibition, all of which will foreground regeneration as both process and theory, offering a community led, design centered pathway toward a regenerative ethos aligned with climate adaptation, citizen participation, and cultural-ecological resilience.