2025 Seedbed Artists
We are pleased to announce the artists awarded 101’s Seedbed Residency 2025.
Seedbed is our funded programme of R&D residencies inviting artists to push the boundaries of work for the outdoors and in public spaces. This year, we're supporting 10 artists to develop creative projects focused on natural landscapes, exploring themes of heritage, environment, inclusion and public space.
Seedbed 2025 coincides with and celebrates the 25th anniversary of Greenham Common’s return to public ownership. At least three projects will be commissioned further as part of this celebration.
Through the wider programme of performance, installation and participation we will work closely with heritage and environment organisations including Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust (BBOWT); the Museum of English Rural Life and Greenham Women Everywhere and can help to broker partnerships with these organisations as relevant.
Beccy Mccray
Green Woman
Subverting the folkloric character usually referred to as the “Green Man”. a figure tied to nature and renewal, the Green Woman encompasses the idea of the crone, the hag and the green-skinned witch. Beccy Mccray’s 'Green Woman' project explores ecofeminism and resistance, inspired by the spirit of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp. It weaves together performance, ritual, and installation to imagine new ways of connecting activism with ecological care. The work reclaims ancient rites while looking to the future, exploring how these symbols of resilience and defiance can inspire today’s challenges.
Beccy’s intersectional climate and nature-focused practice seeks to playfully break down boundaries between art, activism and everyday life. She will work with local activists and communities to uncover and honour Greenham’s living history, collaborating with people who often feel excluded from art, culture and nature as well as ecologists to connect the work to the land’s natural cycles and ecosystems.
Dora Colquhoun
Snakes Live Here
'Snakes Live Here' is an interactive audio piece inspired by the unique ecology and rich history of Greenham Common. This immersive audio walk will create a whole world without imposing on the environment, guiding the audience on a transformative journey through the landscape, reimagining it through the eyes of Adelaide, a mythical creature who is half-snake, half-woman.
Neurodivergent artist and theatre maker Dora is dedicated to creating immersive experiences that transport audiences to alternate realities. She will collaborate with musician and sound designer George Jenkins to combine storytelling, folk music, sound design and Fluxus-inspired interactivity to reframe perceptions of nature and encourage environmental stewardship.
Flick Ferdinando and David Bernstein
This project interrogates Flick and David’s relationship with the site as common land, focusing on its role in shaping climate futures and reflecting on a 60-year interruption. Physical vessels will be placed on the common to foster new dialogues, creating changing views through low-impact viewing pavilions that offer both observation and interaction. The work will research into the past, present, and future stories of the commons, drawing on the experiences of those who have lived on and interacted with the land over time.
Flick Ferdinando is a choreographer, director, creator of gatherings and an Arts and Ecology masters graduate. Her work ranges from performative pieces to natural sculptural spaces and short film. David Bernstein is a maker, creator, and arborist currently pursuing a degree in Architecture. Flick Ferdinando and David Bernstein’s collaborative work evolves from a shared exploration of human and more-than-human presence in nature and earth systems. Through immersive installations, they aim to foster a deeper, more intimate connection with the living planet, often using humour to engage and connect with audiences.
Hamshya Rajkumar
An interdisciplinary artist working with movement, intention and ritual, Hamshya studied architecture and trained as a Bharatnatyam dancer before moving into environmental art and performance. Bharatnatyam dance is often inspired by the sub-Indian continent’s ecology and its flowers, birds, butterflies, fish, deer and tigers. On Greenham Common Hamshya seeks to translate its local ecology, drawing on the site’s rich diversity of wildlife to create a choreographic language drawn from ground nesting birds and human movement.
Combining a site-specific movement and visual arts practice; currently Hamshya focuses on ‘disturbed’ places: ranging from post-industrial landscapes to gardens. Hamshya explores our human place in a world where ‘Nature’ is separate, dominated and objectified, entering long-term relationships with sites, ‘researching’ slowly and seasonally, in hopes of creating works which imagine an intra-species alliance. For the past 4 years, Hamshya has been exploring the former industrial steelworks Ravenscraig site in Scotland and is currently completing their MSc Wildlife Biology & Conservation at Edinburgh Napier.
Louise Jordan
Louise is a songwriter, performer and facilitator creating performances which spotlight hidden histories and tackle issues of inclusion and representation. Her first outdoor performance Pop Up Pedestal realised the power of outdoor arts to connect and empower audiences. Her work challenges existing narratives and brings heritage stories to life in ways that are relatable, relevant and entertaining.
Through this residency she aims to further explore how outdoor performance can empower audiences to action through connection to sites of historic importance. She will explore these themes through folk and protest song in relation to the two co-existing historic narratives at Greenham Common – the women’s peace movement and the site’s military history.
Rachel Lincoln / Akin Theatre
Common
Akin Theatre creates theatre for young audiences. Rachel Lincoln, the lead artist on this project, is a multidisciplinary theatre maker and artist. Her work more recently explores nature, the environment, and creative health.
Rachel’s project 'Common' will follow the framework of her previous project Meadow, which she developed for Croydon’s London Borough of Culture 2023, and apply this approach to Greenham Common's unique biodiversity and heritage.
Rachel aims to create striking visuals that playfully contrast with the natural environment, writing and illustrating an E-book and creating a short film, that will provide the groundwork for a live theatre production with storytelling, music, and illustrations rooted in Greenham Common’s natural beauty.
Rawz
Rawz is a multidisciplinary artist - living and working in Oxford's most under-served area. Surrounded by deprivation in a city synonymous with affluence, Hip Hop was Rawz’ first creative language - now his practice caters to all senses. Rawz creates work based on connection, empathy, and justice; amplifying marginalised voices, challenging dominance and inspiring reflection.
Rawz would like to create a living, evolving sculpture, exploring the duality of creation and destruction and incorporating “the third landscape” - a concept which describes human made structures reclaimed by nature. Rawz’s inspirations include the Women's Peace Camp that he and his mum supported by collecting food and firewood when he was a toddler and the resettlement of Ugandan refugees, fleeing Idi Amin at Greenham Common in the 1970’s.
Teresa Verney-Brookes and Nick Garnett
Common Room
A series of rooms without walls has appeared on the Heathland. For generations the Robinsons have lived on the heath. Heath and Heather Robinson are eccentric folk who know everything about Greenham Common – its history and its ecology. Their door is always open – but there is NO WAY they are stepping outside of these four invisible walls. Too scared to step outside, but curious in the extreme, they view their world through windows, screens, eccentric machines and information gleaned from their many visitors.
‘Common Room’ will be a durational piece which addresses the issues of public access, societies disconnect from nature, the benefits of being in green outdoor spaces which weaves in the history and heritage of the site. The general public will get to meet the Robinsons over a 48-hour period – either in person or via an online video link.
Nick Garnett has twenty years experience producing people-led outdoor participatory sculpture and installation. Teresa Verney-Brookes uses a variety of puppetry, clowning, and mime in her shows. She has worked in the conservation sector as an Ecologist and uses these issues/ topics to inform her outdoor arts work.
YARA + DAVINA
A Moral Compass
The project title, 'A Moral Compass', comes from the collective term for the beliefs, objectives and judgments each individual holds regarding what is right and wrong. The project will look at how our moral codes change over time, in relation to our ethical responsibility for nature and our ecology. 32 moral and ethical ‘positions’ on the face of a compass echo the 32 points on a compass asking what does it mean to live environmentally soundly in such polarised times?
YARA + DAVINA make social practice artwork, creating ambitious public artworks that respond to site, context and audience. Unfailingly inventive, they use formats from within popular culture to make works which are accessible and playful. Using formats such as Arrivals and Departures boards, football, tea, to lollipop ladies, they root their works in the everyday, using a lightness of touch and humour to make works that are both poetic and universal. They are currently working on commissions including Camden Council’s Old Diorama Art Center, a one year residency with government think tank Policy Lab, UP projects, and R+D for the National Trust + Lightbox Gallery.
About Seedbed 2025
The 2025 Seedbed programme will support initial R&D on up to 10 projects to a value of £2500 each. The intention is that at least three of these projects will be further supported with a small commissioning award to create a final public presentation in Summer 2025 as part of a programme of celebrating the 25th anniversary of Greenham Common’s return to public ownership after almost 60 years of military occupation.
After playing a significant and controversial role in Cold War history in the 1980’s as a base for American nuclear weapons and as the site of a long-running women’s peace camp, the thousand acres of Greenham and Crookham Commons are now a peaceful place of natural beauty and popular local leisure amenity that has been actively managed by local Wildlife Trust BBOWT to conserve its special landscape, flora and fauna.
Following on from our work to develop non-arts partnerships through last year’s Seedbed programme we want to further explore how outdoor arts and artists work with themes such as heritage, environment, and inclusion. We are looking for artists that are keen to work with partners in these and other areas using the Greenham Common context as an initial focus, laboratory and test bed for how arts in public space can connect diverse audiences with place and with nature. Seedbed will support the development or adaption of project ideas to respond to the unique ecological, social and political context of Greenham Common.
Through the wider programme of performance, installation and participation we will work closely with heritage and environment organisations including Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust (BBOWT); the Museum of English Rural Life and Greenham Women Everywhere and can help to broker partnerships with these organisations as relevant.
Image: WOMEN AND POWER by 2019 Seedbed Artists Brave New Worlds (location: Greenham Common)
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