Opened yesterday at Southcombe Barn, Widecombe-in-the Moor, Dartmoor, Cartographies of Care is a group exhibition that asks — in the current contexts of warfare and rising sea levels crises — ‘how much longer will we have these lands to care for?’
Vivian Ross-Smith, Refinishing, 2025, still from performance film part of their ongoing dyke project © Vivian Ross-Smith
Through the work of ten UK based and international artist-women and non-binary artists, the exhibition explores gender and ecology through their everyday and peripheral encounters with land and landscape. The majority of works are displayed in the gardens of Southcombe Barn which includes six acres of flower meadows on rural Dartmoor, which itself has a rich history of land-focused art. The exhibition will also coincide with the National Garden Scheme in June when Southcombe gardens will be open to the general public. The ten 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. While ‘land art’ can have a reputation for epic interventions, the work in Cartographies of Care offers the opportunity for a smaller scale, more intimate conversation with the land. The exhibition is curated and presented by Cassinelli Mills, an organisation committed to creating living legacies for contemporary artist-women and non-binary artists past, present and future.
Rebecca Chesney, Water Lines (New York), 2023, hand embroidery on antique map © Rebecca Chesney
The exhibition links together multifaceted practices 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 focus on issues 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.
Rebecca Chesney, Future Landscapes, 2020 (one of fourteen), © Rebecca Chesney. Photo Credit Alexander Christie
Through such 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. Alice Hackney’s specially made map/artwork alongside a newly commissioned exhibition text by Prof. Vron Ware guides the visitor through the exhibition internally and externally so that the very nature of viewing the exhibition becomes an artistic act in itself.
Susanna Bauer, Becoming (No.3) (detail), 2026, magnolia leaf, cotton thread © Susanna Bauer
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. Cartographies of Care takes place in partnership with KARST, coinciding with Lucia Pizzani: Faunal Succession, a solo exhibition touring to Focal Point and Mostyn.
Cartographies of Care is open until Sunday 7th June, Thurs – Sun, 10.30am – 3pm, and is free to attend. More information here.