Gathering the Commons: curators Catherine Morland and Alexandra Warder MacEwen
Friday 6, Saturday 7, Sunday 8 June
11am-5pm
The exhibition Gathering the Commons, produced with Bosse & Baum (info@bosseandbaum.com) brings together a group of artists whose practices explore the intricate relationships between humans, nonhumans, landscapes, and natural materials. Artworks by four artists: Lucy Mayes, Catherine Morland, Marissa Stoffer and Sara Trillo are exhibited in St Stephen’s Chapel, West Norwood Cemetery. A series of talks, events and walks will accompany the exhibition on 7 & 8 June - details of these individual events can be found here.
The exhibition delves into ecological histories, human-plant relationships, sustainable making and the social significance of handmade traditions. The artists’ diverse approaches include: performative walks uncovering landscape histories, pigment creation from urban waste and wild plants, cordage and basketry techniques rooted in traditional knowledge, and installations that speak to the symbiotic relationships between humans and their environments. By focusing on slow, intentional craft practices and deep material research, these artists challenge contemporary disconnections, offering sensory experiences that reconnect us with the living systems that sustain us.
The artists draw on the location of West Norwood Cemetery, particularly its unique ecological features and rich biodiversity shaped by its geology, hydrology, and landscaping. As one of London’s “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries, this historic site was built on the remnants of the Great North Wood that stretched for seven miles from Croydon to the river Thames at Deptford. Most of this ancient oak woodland and the commons surrounding it was engulfed by urban expansion and the practice of enclosure in the 19th century. Some vestiges of this natural heritage remain visible today. Through their installations and events, the artists aim to engage local communities while highlighting the cemetery’s rich biodiversity and cultural legacy. This includes its role as a haven for wildlife and its historical significance as a Victorian-era garden cemetery.
Gathering the Commons is part of ‘Illuminate’ a ten day celebration to mark the end of the National Lottery Heritage Fund project designed to conserve the Cemetery’s magnificent landscape and architecture, as well as offer new experiences and facilities to increase community use. Find out about other events here: www.westnorwoodcemetery.org/illuminate. The exhibition takes place in the newly refurbished St Stephen’s Chapel in the Hellenic Enclosure in West Norwood Cemetery. Please allow 15mins to walk from the main cemetery entrance on the corner of Norwood Road and Robson Road down to St Stephen’s. The venue has level access, and if you need to drive, then parking is also available outside the venue. An accessible toilet is available inside the venue.
More about the artists:
Lucy Mayes is an artist, pigment maker & educator working in London. Under the name ‘London Pigment’ she uses materials from urban waste streams to make recycled pigments for creative practitioners to use and communicate with. The creation of pigments from geographically specific materials is used to unearth hidden stories and foster connections between humans and nonhumans. Through the process of pigment-making, Lucy Mayes developed a close relationship with the oaks of the cemetery: Pin, English, and Holm, not simply as trees, but as material collaborators. Their wood, galls, ash, and tannins became agents of transformation, enabling sensory, chemical, and visual engagement. The installation titled Transmuting The Oak: An ode to Quercus robur, 2025 uses reclaimed English oak, sourced as waste from a cabinetmaker, to create a spectrum of natural pigments. The oak, symbolising strength and endurance, was selected for its chemical properties that enhance and stabilise natural dyes.
In the series of small vessels, titled Breath of the Earth (returning), 2025 the pigments are only temporarily bound to their surfaces. These works, reminiscent of funerary urns, and displayed on a funerary bier, meditate on memory, fragility, and the impossibility of true preservation. In them, colour is not just seen, it is remembered, mourned, and continually transformed. This piece forms part of Mayes’ wider practice as both artist and researcher, where the relationship between material and meaning is constantly explored.
Catherine Morland is a London-based artist and gardener whose work bridges art and horticulture. She explores the use of plants and plant fibres through traditional techniques like basketry, weaving, cordage and knotting, focusing on the social and cultural significance of handmade crafts. Her practice emphasizes the ecological and historical value of processes once considered essential but later relegated to “craft.” Viewing basketwork as a form of commons, she fosters a reciprocal relationship with nature by understanding plant life cycles and habitats, promoting sustainability, care, and skill in her work. Morland’s collection of vessels, titled Basket is in the Roots, That’s Where it Begins, 2025 made from dried grass and other plants found in the cemetery are shaped like urns or totems alongside two installations titled Between Worlds, 2025 and Pioneer Taraxacum, 2025 made using cordage from Dandelions also growing near the chapel. The work draws on the Victorian symbolism found throughout the cemetery and the concept of ‘thin spaces’ in folklore which represent the liminal space between worlds. In particular the veiled urns carved out of stone scattered among the graves which symbolise the boundaries between life and death. The artist also considers the site as a living, breathing, regenerative space, where self-seeding wildflowers, lichen and moss covered stone and ancient trees have created wildlife corridors between the headstones. This overgrown quality is not decay in the pejorative sense, but compost—an active, generative state where endings become beginnings. These works follow from a broader enquiry into the idea of the commons: how histories of land, labour, and enclosure shape our relationship to nature. In this context, the cemetery becomes not just a memorial landscape but a site of resistance to an extractive system. It becomes a space where we might reconcile ourselves with our place within nature’s cycles rather than apart from them.
Marissa Stoffer is a cross-disciplinary artist and educator whose practice explores ecology, plants, and humanity’s evolving relationships with the natural world. Rooted in slow craft and foraging, she creates natural dyes and pigments from plants collected on walks, combining scientific inquiry with botanical colour making. Her work spans textiles, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and performance, often drawing on esoteric philosophy, myth, and animism to explore trees as central figures of identity and connection. Through her immersive process and deep engagement with place, Stoffer uncovers the stories, metaphors, and cosmologies embedded in plant life. Her materials, methods, and themes are shaped by the seasons, local ecology, stories, science, and sustainability to inspire a sense of kinship, wonder, and awe for the more-than-human world. Marissa Stoffer’s work in this exhibition, titled Duir, 2025, meaning oak tree in ancient Celtic tradition, which the artist has installed in a doorway of the chapel, suggests a gateway. The artist foraged oak leaves from the trees in the cemetery and used them as a dye for the textile, cut and pinched to form patterns reminiscent of tree bark. She explores our complex relationship with plants through intricate connections between humans and Earth, inspired by semiotics, geometry, language, myth, folklore, and science. Central to her practice is foraging for colour, creating dyes and pigments from plants collected on walks which deepens her understanding of plant species and their intertwined stories within our cosmologies and evolution.
Sara Trillo’s ceramic and clay floor-based installation, titled Ac-Efer, 2025 is inspired by the Great North Wood, a vast oak woodland which once included West Norwood, and the now culverted river Effra, which flows beneath this cemetery. Oak in Anglo-Saxon is “ac”, and “efer” is Anglo Saxon for riverbank, the possible origin of the name Effra. From the Middle Ages onwards, oak from the Great North Wood was coppiced for timber and charcoal. As London expanded, the woodland was cleared, so that now only small fragments of the original wood remain. Similarly, the river Effra, a tributary of the Thames, and itself fed by springs from the Great North Wood, became increasingly suburbanised to the extent that in the Victorian period it was incorporated into the London sewerage system. Ac-Efer honours this lost woodland and subterranean water. The fired clay pieces represent oak tree branches, arranged like the course of the river Effra and its tributaries. While each bough has a texture formed by pressing wet clay onto a living oak tree, the use of black, fractured clay is suggestive of wood that has been cut and burned. Equally, the pieces could be perceived as relics, unearthed from a time when the Great North Wood and river Effra flourished.
Information on all our Installations and Exhibitions can be found here
Biographies:
Lucy Mayes is an artist, pigment maker & educator working in London. Under the name ‘London Pigment’ she uses materials from urban waste streams to make recycled pigments for creative practitioners to use and communicate with. The creation of pigments from geographically specific materials is used to unearth hidden stories and foster connections between humans and nonhumans.
Mayes has a background in fine art from the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art. She trained in pigment making under pigment maker Keith Edwards and worked as a pigment specialist at L. Cornelissen & Son. Lucy develops her own recipes and works as a consultant, with teaching experience at institutions including the V&A, Tate, Somerset House, West Dean College and The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. She has delivered talks, consultations, and commissions for clients such as Neptune Interiors, L’Oréal, Lisa Eldridge and Richard Wentworth. Her work is held in the collections of Sheffield Museums and the Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, where she has a permanent display on the craft of pigment making. Lucy is on the board of Pigments Revealed International, a not for profit dedicated to building a global pigment community. Her book ‘The Natural Pigment Handbook’ will be published by David and Charles Publishing in November 2025.
Catherine Morland is a London-based artist and gardener whose work bridges art and horticulture. She explores the use of plants and plant fibres through traditional techniques like basketry, weaving, cordage and knotting, focusing on the social and cultural significance of handmade crafts. Her practice emphasizes the ecological and historical value of processes once considered essential but later relegated to “craft.” Viewing basketwork as a form of commons, she fosters a reciprocal relationship with nature by understanding plant lifecycles and habitats, promoting sustainability, care, and skill in her work.
Catherine Morland is a visual artist based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art Painting in 2003. Her practice lies in the intersection of art and horticulture.She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Sweden, Moldova, and Kenya. Recent projects: Images of the Good life in the East Gallery Lutnita, Chisinau, Moldova 2024. Wasteless 2 at Way Out East Gallery, University of London 2024. Performing the Commons at Celsius Projects, Malmö Sweden 2023 supported by Riksförbundet Sveriges Konstföreningar. The Commons- Re Enchanting the World at the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading, UK, 2021-2022 supported by Arts Council England. The Speed of Thought, Art Academy London, Newington Library Gallery 2019. Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019 RWA Bristol 2019
Marissa Stoffer is a cross-disciplinary artist and educator whose practice explores ecology, plants, and humanity’s evolving relationships with the natural world. Rooted in slow craft and foraging, she creates natural dyes and pigments from plants collected on walks, combining scientific inquiry with botanical colour making. Her work spans textiles, painting, sculpture, installation, sound, and performance, often drawing on esoteric philosophy, myth, and animism to explore trees as central figures of identity and connection. Through her immersive process and deep engagement with place, Stoffer uncovers the stories, metaphors, and cosmologies embedded in plant life. Her materials, methods, and themes are shaped by the seasons, local ecology, stories, science, and sustainability to inspire a sense of kinship, wonder, and awe for the more-than-human world.
Stoffer holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2023) and an MA in Fine Art (Combined History of Art and Painting) from the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art (2014). She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with recent exhibitions including Wasteless 2: Material Journeys (University of East London, 2024), Voices From the Lea (Canal River Trust, London, 2024), Even Poets Were Jealous of These, (Vermillon Partners, London, 2023), and Beneath the Burren (Ireland, 2023). Her practice has been supported by the Colart Materials Award (2020), Royal Scottish Academy Latimer Award (2019), Scottish Council and Creative Scotland, Edinburgh Visual Artist and Craft Makers Award (2018), Hope Scott Trust Bursary (2018), and Creative Scotland Open Funding (2017). She has undertaken residencies across Europe, Asia, and South America, most recently at Qingcheng Mountain UNESCO Reserve in China (2024) and Burren College of Art in Ireland (2023). Marissa also leads bespoke workshops titled Foraging for Colour, where participants learn about plants through the sensory practices of walking, dyeing, and storytelling. These workshops, ranging from one-day walks to multi-day intensives, have been hosted in collaboration with organisations such as the Canal River Trust, Leith School of Art, and Connecting Threads: River Tweed.
Sara Trillo explores landscapes through research, walking, and making, seeking to uncover hidden histories of the human presence within our shared ecological environment. Her sculptural output ranges from small handheld tools to immersive installations deploying archaic making skills such as flint-napping and plant-dyeing processes. She also leads public walks which include performative sharing narratives about the mythologies of the sites explored.
She is a visual artist based in East Kent, with a studio in Margate. She studied Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts and in 2017 became an Associate of Open School East in Margate. She has exhibited widely in the UK and northern Europe, as well as undertaking funded residencies in diverse locations including France, Germany, Cyprus and Turkey. Recent exhibitions include “Chaleur Humane”, the 2023 Dunkerque Triennale Art et Industrie; “Still and Still Moving”, Od Arts Festival Somerset 2023; “Re-Enchanting the Commons”, Celsius Projects, Malmö 2023; “Going Underground”, Brewery Tap, Folkestone 2023; “Wasteless 2” at Way Out East, University of East London 2024; “Ground Up” at GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn 2024; “Marling”, collaboration with Fiona Parry for SALT + EARTH, Folkestone 2024; “Alleycumfee”(solo show) at Daphne Oram Gallery, Canterbury Christ Church University 2024; “Shadders” at Project 78 Gallery, St Leonards on Sea 2025; and “Clinging On”, Glassworks Studios, London 2025. Recent commissioned performative walks in 2024 include “Swept Away” for Cement Fields/Whitstable Biennale Archive, “Nether Walk” for “The Making of a Meadow”, RCA/Kent Downs National Landscape, “Denge Ness” for Jarman Now/Manchester Metropolitan University, “Widders Dump” for Seadog Books, and “Walking to Alleycumfee” for Canterbury Christ Church University. Sara Trillo is one of the commissioned artists for the 2025 Folkestone Triennial “How Lies the Land?” curated by Sorcha Carey.
