SOLU dialogues: Glasgow Seed Library
with Rowan Lear & Joss Allen
30 May 2025 at 18:00
Kulosaari Manor, Kipparlahdensilmukka 5, 00810 Helsinki

Join artist, writer and seed librarian of Glasgow Seed Library Rowan Lear in conversation with artworker and researcher Joss Allen at Kivinokka palstat (allotments) exploring what it means to live, work and think with seeds.

Stemming from their work with/in Glasgow Seed Library, they reflect on the practices and politics of seed saving, and how a seed library can function not only as a space for exchange, but as a lively, multispecies community. Together, they will discuss what seeds and seed savers can teach us about working with/in institutions, organising at a community scale, and the relationship between landwork and cultural production.

The talk coincides with a seed and seedling swap. If you have, bring seeds or seedlings to exchange and/or gift.  

Joss Allen can be found in the garden, amongst the weeds and compost heaps. He is an artworker and researcher interested in how art influences ecological ways of being and practices of care towards more-than-human worlds. Joss's work has been influenced by his time as a support worker for adults with autism, a labourer on an organic farm and a refuse collector, among others. Between 2017 and 2020, they were the project coordinator for the Town is the Garden, a three-year creative community food-growing project with Deveron Projects. Recently, he was co-artistic director of ATLAS Arts with Yvonne Billimore. Joss is currently a PhD researcher working with the Glasgow Seed Library.

Dr Rowan Lear is an artist and writer, based in Scotland. Colluding with photography, writing, vegetation, clay and other lively materials, Rowan traces the sticky and entangled histories of land, labour, photography and ecology. Since 2019, Rowan has worked as a Seed Librarian, co-cultivating a living community of seeds and stories at Glasgow Seed Library, a project hosted by CCA, Glasgow. They also work at University of Dundee, researching marginalised cultures and practices of energy, particularly the relationships between light, plants and living soil. Rowan currently co-organises Un/Nature, a monthly queer ecologies reading group at Glasgow Zine Library, is developing The Sentient Garden, a multispecies and multisensory commission at Forgan Arts Centre, Fife, and is preparing a publication about vegetal kinship for Attunements, a book series published by Errant Bodies Press, Berlin.

Photo: Glasgow Seed Library