Since 2022, Grand Union has been collaborating with Exodus, working through how their practice might expand into the many parts of the organisation’s programme and structure.
Exodus Crooks, Doing Duties for Miss Dell (2023), installation view Epiphany (Temporaire), courtesy ICF and Ort Gallery.
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.
Through conversations that have explored alternative education systems, systemic marginalisation, labouring with the hands as passed down through ancestral lineage, the improvisation of nature and how the garden could be a hospital*, Exodus and Grand Union have been developing models for how artists can work with and alongside organisations in multiple ways.
Over the next couple of years Exodus will be working with Grand Union on an exploratory project with the working title of ‘Students of nature’. The project will delve into the possibilities of the life teachings of nature through the garden and each as a pedagogical tool. The project will be developed over time in conversation with the garden and the people we work with and alongside in the city and beyond.
Exodus is a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist and educator whose practice centres the relationship with self. Observing the results of fractious domesticity, despair, and passion, their art tends to appear as questions of self-actualisation and the role that religion and spirituality play in that journey to enlightenment.
Over the last year, they have been using gardening, text, filmmaking, and installation to further explore indigenous thought. Specifically researching what it means to ‘return [to] home/self’ with a special interest in the journeys between the seen and unseen world(s).
Ensuring that their methods are queer, radical, and transformative, they use (formal & informal) classrooms as a space to confront Western ways of teaching and learning. In both their creative practice and their role as an educator, they use art as a tool to have hard conversations softly.
*hospital – thinking about the final Pope.L (1955 – 2023) exhibition at South London Gallery of the same name and the early meanings of the word as variously ‘host’, ‘guest’, ‘stranger’, ‘shelter for the needy’.
