Sean Roy Parker
Visual Arts recipient 2024
Sean Roy Parker is a visual artist, writer and landworker who works open-endedly across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, foraging, cooking, publishing, workshops and community gardening. Until its closure, he was a core member of The Field, an experimental artist-run living project in an ex-National Coal Board and Steiner School building in Derbyshire, East Midlands.
Parker practises slow, low-tech crafts and food preservation with consumer waste and wild abundance, and shares extensively through labour exchange, favours and artswaps. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and class division, he challenges the received understanding of what constitutes artistic production through his process-led and (re)generative practice. Under the name Fermental Health, he writes about material lifecycles, interspecies intimacy and collaborative problem-solving through the lens of food justice. In the spirit of degrowth much of his work gets eaten, composted or repurposed.
Recent solo works include Man of Kent, Piccalilli Gallery, London (2024); With Us All, a permanent public sculpture in St Raph’s Edible Garden, London (2023); and The Beans, Two Queens, Leicester (2023). He was a Wysing Arts Centre resident 2023–24, and is a recipient of the Axisweb Fellowship bursary 2024.
Parker has a forthcoming debut poetry collection, ‘stewarding’, published by Monitor Books, London. He is currently working on an 18-month public commission for Three Rivers Bexley, and will co-curate ‘Edible City’ at Audra Festival in Lithuania in 2025.
“I am equally shocked and grateful to receive this award. To suddenly swap precarity for spaciousness is overwhelming, as I can plan my future in a way that has never been possible. Waking up every day and choosing this path is something I question often and I feel strangely vindicated for being so stubborn. To be able to continue doing what I am inexplicably compelled to do is a huge privilege. I deeply thank my nominator and the judges for their belief in me and the chance to experience this life-changing moment with my family, friends and peers.”
Examples of work
MAN OF KENT, 2024
Installation, entire basement. Presented as a solo exhibition at Piccalilli Gallery in south London. In the centre of the room there is an arrangement of plant ink drawings of pubs from Parker’s hometown, melted pewter tankards and various curios atop a low wooden platform sitting on empty beer bottles and coasters. There are two large plant ink drawings pinned into the wall with blackthorns, and in the recess opposite a homebrew set-up fermenting all the expired beer from the bottles into artisanal vinegar. The gallery is situated in a former pub cellar, a fitting venue for a show about digestion. Dr Kaajal Modi also wrote a companion text about using art to overcome emotional constipation.
WITH US ALL, 2023
Permanent public sculpture, 4m x 2.5m x 2.5m. Commissioned by Metroland Cultures and Sufra NW London. Glasshouse made from recycled materials situated in St Raph’s Edible Garden in Brent, London. The original proposal was selected by estate residents, staff and volunteers. Following community consultation, Parker designed an accessible space where visitors can comfortably sit and look at the garden or use prompts and tools to explore further. The inspiration was to alleviate any anxiety felt by visitors to actively contribute and instead see themselves as part of the environment that is always changing. Build was led by carpenter Chris Prempeh and apprentice Om Mathija using recovered sash windows and fitted with furniture made by local residents.
THE BEANS, 2023
Installation, found materials. Solo exhibition at Two Queens, Leicester, supported by Arts Council England.
Parker set up a self-supporting system for growing beans from seed, including a solar-powered germination bed made from an old staircase and windows, a wormery in a bathtub producing fresh compost, and live fermentation arrangements for making fruit scrap vinegar and soil amendments. He also hacked a drainpipe to harvest rainwater inside the gallery and reupholstered old benches for visitor seating. Young bean plants were donated to gallery audiences, local gardeners and neighbouring businesses who brought back seeds in the winter to deposit in the new community bean bank.
TRANSFORMING ABUNDANCE, 2022
Fermentation masterclass across four weeks.
Commissioned by Rebecca Beinart as part of the Nourishment programme for Primary, Nottingham, delivered at Smallfood Bakery.
Parker is shown holding a vinegar mother up to students in front of a row of jars filled with fermented foods. Across four sessions, he taught a group of community gardeners, small farmers and community chefs how to preserve foods using traditional techniques used by peasants for thousands of years. Parker shared recipes for turning cabbage into sauerkraut, tea into kombucha and milk into yoghurt, and processed vegetables donated by local growers into delicious, probiotic foods that were eventually shared at a free communal lunch for the public.
