Exodus first began working with Grand Union as a facilitator on The Growing Project, primarily at St. Anne’s, a weekly connection that quickly started to influence the direction of their overall practice.
‘Untitled’, 2022, commissioned by Grain Projects. Image courtesy of Exodus Crooks.
In 2022, Exodus spent three months training under the teaching of renowned Jamaican artist Marcia Henry. Whilst learning how to grow and carve calabash shells, Exodus gained a greater understanding of nature as an artistic medium as well as the teachings and communal healing that lies within nature.
This time spent in Jamaica reaffirmed an already intimate relationship Exodus had with nature and the elements and through further conversations, Exodus explored radical pedagogies, alternative education structures, knowledge passed down through their school of ancestry, the improvisation of nature and how the garden can be a site of care.
Conversations often taking place whilst eating a warm home cooked meal, Exodus and the Grand Union team grew closer and noticed a range of ways artists and organisations can and should work together tenderly and openly to have a social impact in their local communities through art, gardening and agriculture.
From this, Exodus will be working with Grand Union on an exploratory project with the working title of ‘Students of Nature’. The project will continue with these ideas of radical pedagogies based around the life teachings of nature through the garden.
The project will develop over time in conversation with the garden and the people we work with and alongside in the city and beyond, influencing Exodus’s artistic response that they’ll produce at the end of the program.
About Exodus CrooksOpen accordion
Exodus Crooks (they/he) is a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and educator interested in self-determination and how it is steered by religion and spirituality.
Informed by a fractious domestic life, their practice is auto ethnographical and exists in the orbit of their educational role where they work to reimagine Western pedagogy.
Exodus is currently experimenting with assemblage, text, and installation to better understand themes of belonging and free movement.
You can find out more about Exodus’ practice via their website by clicking here.
