In 2021-22, the Queer Ecologies collective was artist in residence at Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, one of my favourite places in London, thanks to an Arts Council England Project Grant.

We explored the layers of history, alter-life relations, and community which make up the Park’s ecology – working with and inspired by the interdependence which is so evident in the space. We held monthly full-moon-fires to connect with queer communities local to the area, Ama ran a Black science fiction writing workshops, and Hari ran a workshop on the ecologies of care.

I wrote and performed The Clay in Us – a scifi storytelling walk, with ceramics inscribed with poetry installed around the park:

Mysterious poems have started appearing on half-buried pots, and Rowan is convinced they’re from the future… What are they trying to tell us? And what will Rowan do about it? Discover messages from descendants, ancestors, and ecologies in this immersive storytelling walk and installation celebrating queer human and non-human kin.

Queer Ecologies is an interdisciplinary intervention into how we live, grow, love, make kin and stand in allyship with the alter-human – a collaboration between me, artist and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge, and researcher, gardener and compostist Hari Byles. Queer Ecologies tells new stories about nature and our connection to it, empowering interspecies collaborations, and honouring the inherantly queer patterns and relations found throughout nature. 

As part of the project I collaborated with artist and ceramicist Nissa Nishikawa for a workshop combining poetry, pottery, and speculative fiction. We created clay pots inscribed with messages from the future – imagining the people who we will become ancestors to, and what they might want to say to us. The pots will became part of The Clay in Us, forming the finale to the piece.

I created four large pots, which were inscribed with poems from the story and installed around the Cemetery park.

I got to perform the show four times in the space – once in pouring rain! It was gorgeous to be able to create something so entwined with a space. It brought together my experience as a non-binary trans person with my longings for a better future, and my sense of belonging in the ecosystems I’m part of.