Topobiographies

Miche Fabre Lewin

Born in Zimbabwe, Miche came to the UK in 1980 to study Comparative Literature, French and Art History at University of East Anglia, Norwich. She later went on to complete postgraduate training in art therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art & Psychotherapy. Having moved to Oxford, she worked as an art therapist within NHS mental health departments, and set up a private practice in Healing for Liberation. In her teaching on the Art Therapy training courses at Bath College of Art, Miche innovated body-centred therapeutic methods and the use of found objects gathered from domestic and environmental arenas. In the late 1990’s she founded Kitchen Ritual hosting hands-on workshops to encourage active food citizenship. From 2000 Miche’s socially engaged arts practice between the UK and South Africa foccussed on food and soil rituals as a liberatory process for social healing. Miche’s ecology of practices are pedagogical and convivial interventions which enliven our kith and kinship - the connections between human beings of all cultures and the restoring of our living habitats.

“Art offers me a space of potential and becoming. It is a threshold place to cultivate my instinctual, emotional and embodied capacity to be living authentically in presence - embracing the political and the sacred, the ancestral and archetypal humanness of life on sentient Earth. With the matter and metaphor of living processes I am in a continuous enquiry into ‘what is a life?’, the interrogating of white racialised culture, the re-membering that we dwell in a radical belonging with nature. For me being an artist guides me in gratitude, respect, and the courage to challenge oppression, to seek to heal my own wounds and to honour the sacred in the everyday.”

Flora Gathorne- Hardy

Flora’s life began in rural Suffolk, England – a region that gifted her a deep love of land. After a degree in geography and working as a parliamentary researcher, she completed a PhD entitled ‘Just Design’ at the University of Cambridge and as a visiting scholar at University of California at Berkeley. Her research between Liverpool and San Francisco allowed her to deeply explore the intersection of social justice and environmental design and catalysed her decision to train as a landscape architect. A selection of her design practice include: policy guidance such as Inclusive School Design building bulletin with the Institute of Education; designing playable spaces with Playlink and as part of the design team for the award-winning Susan Mubarek Children’s Musuem in Cairo; ecological planting for schemes such as Greening the Romford Ringroad with What-If? Urban Design; and restorative landscapes design for Maggie’s Oxford.

“My life and art evolve within geographies of connection. For me, making art is fundamentally an experience of responding with the intelligences and energies of people, other sentient beings and those of the land with its layered memories. These experiences come through my mind, hands, dreams, sounds, sensations, conversations, all expressed as a movement of co-making and co-thinking through drawing, writing, performance, and designing. Art is a way of being that allows me to become more fully present to life as an interconnected whole, enhancing my ability to interact in ways that add to the diversity of expression and habitat.”

The collaboration between Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy began in 2010 as a two-day inquiry. What emerged was Everything is Here - a large-scale artwork that combined writing - ‘It’s Food – It’s Land’, ‘New Rhythms’ – imagery and drawings that together interwove their different and complementary artistic practices. 

From 2010 to 2015, Miche and Flora undertook a wide range of commissions and residencies between the UK and Southern Africa, working as the creative practice Touchstones Earth. A selection of projects includes: Listening Place with Creative Partnerships (2011); Food of the Land durational intervention for the Art and Sustainability Summit with Emergence (2012); Re-naturing the City artist residency with the Bag Factory and Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg, which included Miche’s TEDx Soweto talk ‘Cooking Culture and Conversations’ (2012); Re-Birth residency at NIROX Foundation, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa (2012); Living Soil Shrine residency at the Living Soil Forum, Ytterjarna, Sweden (2013); Living Room with FutureCity for Guy’s and St Thomas’ new cancer hospital (2014); and curating the award-winning Soil Saturdays with the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World as the UK’s contribution to UN International Year of Soils (2015).

This formative time gave rise to a richness of collaborative methodologies and artistic practices. In 2013 Miche and Flora were invited to become Research Associates with the newly formed Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University. In 2014, the Centre’s Director, Professor Michel Pimbert, awarded Miche a doctoral scholarship to reflect on the transformative nature of her food ritual practice. This catalysed a new chapter of research and development, which embraced the radical collaborative methodology of Thinking-Listening partnerships, emerging through Flora acting as witness and reflector to Miche through her own drawing and scribing practice. The research journey unfolded as a sequence of residencies within the Sustainability Institute, South Africa, and in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Transitions, Stellenbosch University. Through this global South-North exchange, Miche evolved the concept of sympoiethics as a daily practice in an ethic of care for the re-integration of human liberation and ecosystem restoration.

“The importance of your work is the knitting and re-weaving of relationships through being in contact with the touchstone of the living Earth. It begins by listening to people, which opens this warmth of the heart, trust and the sense of coming together”. Dr Jess Schulschenk, Co-Director of the Sustainability Institute, Lynedoch, South Africa

Throughout this time of arts-based research, Miche and Flora continued to contribute artworks and artful methodologies for knowing within diverse educational programmes, exhibitions and forums. A selection of these include: ritual and research exchanges with Alanus University, Ashridge College, Coventry University and the University of the Arts London; contributions to international exhibitions such as Ecovention Europe: Art to Transform Ecologies 1957-2017 (2017) and Life of Water as part of Alive in the Universe within collateral Venice Biennale (2019); participating as Artists in Residence with the Centre for Future Thinking, Hawkwood College (2018); and innovating Planet Possibility with the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (2020-2021).

Between 2020 to 2022, Miche and Flora were commissioned to publish image-text works and written material on art, aesthetics, ritual and sympoiethics within academic books, journals, magasines and interdisciplinary online platforms - the unfolding of a new imaginary which places art-making as an arena for inhabiting and enlivening sympoiethics. During these two years, they created a sound physical infrastructure of indoor, outdoor and kitchen studios within which to explore and experiment with a sympoeithic ecology of practices for the flourishing of our human and animate Earth. In 2022, Studio Fabre Hardy was launched within this transformative orientation towards natural-cultural world-making.