Created over a year by Dr Helen Billinghurst & Joanne Dorothea-Smith, the initial aim of the project was to deploy an allegorical language – that of allotment gardening – to interrogate the painful personal fall-out of being put through the redundancy process.

Both artists – former teaching colleagues – lost lecturing positions in 2024 due to university budget cutbacks, the current blight of Higher Education and the Arts.

During the year that the two artists played together in the allotment, the project flourished and grew to be about much more. So, while themes of shame, enforced silence and alienation that the brutal process of redundancy induces are present in the work, other themes – including resourcefulness, friendship, the marking of time and the changing seasons – emerge.

The Arts Education budget in England was slashed by the Tory government in 2021, redirecting money towards ‘strategic priority’ subjects (sciences and medicine); a crisis further aggravated by ongoing cuts to public arts funding that has seriously impacted those working within the sector.

Garden Leave is a poignant, ghostly, humorous and hopeful response to this situation. It speaks of the feral delights of being outside the institution and outside in general; of being thrown on the compost heap, on the wrong side of the fence, and of cultivating relationships with the more-than-human world.

The work consists of large-scale photographic works, with sound works and moving image.

Find out more here.