Cartographies of Care: Women/Land/Art

How much longer will we have these lands to care for? In the current crises contexts of warfare and rising sea levels, this exhibition explores gender and ecology through the everyday and peripheral encounters of artist-women and non-binary artists with land and landscape. By positioning care as a cartographic practice, the exhibition challenges dominant spatial histories and foregrounds intimate practices we have with the land. Cartographies of Care offers landscapes not as monumental conquests, but as relational fields shaped by bodies, memory and lived experience. The artists invite viewers to consider how landscapes might be held by humans rather than mastered, and how art can cultivate forms of ecological relation rooted in attentiveness rather than assertion.

The exhibition links together the multifaceted practices of ten artists offering expanded conversations in women’s experiences of, relationships with, and approaches to, land. Rebecca Chesney, Iman Datoo, and Arabel Lebrusan engage land as a politicised and contested site, foregrounding how ecology is entangled with power, extraction, and social histories through research-led and site-responsive approaches. Susanna Bauer, Edie Evans, and Laura Hopes centre practices of care, repair, and reuse, working intimately with found and foraged materials to explore themes such as fragility and craft traditions. The practices of SHARP, Lucia Pizzani, Vivian Ross-Smith and Alice Hackney offer embodied narratives told through ancestral and personal histories and situated experiences.

Through intimate acts of walking, gathering, tending, storytelling, drawing, research, craft practices and speculative and deep mapping, these artists produce alternative geographies placing land and art through feminist, decolonial and ecological lenses that centre the ‘margins’ rather than the monument. Care becomes both method and politics: a way of knowing land through sustained attention and responsibility, mapping obscured experiences with land, in place of dominance and destruction over vast terrains.

Curated by Cassinelli Mills in partnership with KARST, Plymouth