Perpetual Potato with Small Spade Farm

This workshop is open to University of Toronto Scarborough students registered in VPSC95H3F - Theory and Practice: Art & Social Justice.

Lauren Nurse and Shannon Gerard of Small Spade Farm lead a hands-on workshop that turns Outdoor School's mobile sculpture Art Farm Stand into a heated sand table filled with sweet potato slips that Lauren has been cultivating and growing through multiple farming seasons. Students can take away slips and keep them growing at home until it's time to plant them next year.

Perpetual Potato is about ways to interrogate and disrupt the dominance of our broken food system. Agency and sovereignty around food production provides communities with the means and the knowledge to feed themselves, outside of the industrial food system. It is a form of landscape literacy—a deep map of the natural world, and a knowledge system that we have become disconnected from. Perpetual Potato directly connects participants to an example of simple, sustainable methods of growing food for themselves and their community. Social justice cannot be separated from environmental justice—this project is rooted in the concept that empowering people by giving them the means to feed themselves is a form of activism and ecological stewardship.  

The workshop includes a zine/workbook and a discussion of growth cycles, the radical-ness of seed saving, farm seasons, and all the things that ecological farmers and activists have in common. 

Lauren Nurse is an artist and farmer working in printmaking, sculpture, and installation. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from York University. Notable exhibitions include Cold Comfort at Cambridge Art Galleries, There’s always room on the broom at Open Studio, Port Credit: The Projects an off-site project by Blackwood Gallery, Terra Tremente at Museo Civico d’Arte Contemporanea, and Salon Écarlate at Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery, New Hampshire, U.S.A. Nurse has taught printmaking, design, drawing, sculpture, and contemporary art practice at OCAD University, University of Toronto Mississauga, and York University.

Shannon Gerard crochets (a lot), makes books, quilts political protest banners, and produces site-specific textile installations. As a professional mischief maker, her public/pedagogical projects emphasize the materials and ethos of independent publishing as social-political engagements. Gerard is an Associate Professor in Publications and Print Media at OCAD University and a part time farmer at Small Spade Farm.

The gallery is wheelchair accessible, and seating is available.