Sunday 15 June
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Artist talk with Iman Datoo
Iman Datoo, right, engaging in a storytelling performance with Tsitsi Chirikure and Ashish Ghadiali, Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature?, in June 2024. Courtesy of the artists.
Iman Datoo is this year’s Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence. Through a partnership with Queen’s Biological Station (QUBS), she is studying natural kinships which span geographies, species and ecologies while living and working on the shores of Opinicon Lake at QUBS.
Each year QUBS runs a seminar series from May through August, with topics running the gamut from natural history, environmental management, and natural history to wildlife art. All are welcome!
Iman will discuss her research at QUBS, a novel ecosystem in the Frontenac axis where migratory bodies—both human and non-human—converge across geologies of granite, limestone and gneiss. Iman is investigating narratives of abundance and the generative/porous edges of species boundaries. Through crafted interventions that bridge reason and imagination, she draws from practices of deep-listening and speculates on theories of quantum time to invite new modes of sensing, observing and relating to the landscape.
Iman Datoo (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Devon, UK. Her practice brings together botany and cartography within the spatial environments of stories to consider forces of agency, liveness and animacy between plants, soils and people. At the heart of her practice is a desire to build relationality with our non-human counterparts and explore how forms of human agency can be mobilised through modes of listening, noticing and sensory inquiry. Iman’s projects encompass installation, film, participatory performance and sculpture, with each medium carefully selected to reflect the ideas and interactions at play. Her works challenge the binaries between natural and artificial, inanimate and lively, wild and cultivated, serving as grounds for reimagining ecosystem recovery through imagination and speculation.
Rooted in South-West England’s unique ecological and cultural landscape, Iman’s practice addresses local concerns of environmental justice, land politics and plant migration. She is currently working with climate justice organisation Radical Ecology to develop a 100-year care plan for a post-plantation woodland in Devon. Her long-term focus is on soil recovery in Cornwall’s post-industrial mining landscapes through an intersection of eco-somatic art practice with feminist science studies and decolonial ecology. This work builds on a long-term project stemming from her residency with the Eden Project and University of Exeter, titled Making Kin with Soil.
Recent works include Movement is Natural (2024), a film uncovering the knowledge held in the disturbances of so-called ‘waste’ soils in Cornwall’s mining tips and pits; Soil-Brain, Gut-Brain (2023), an audio-tactile installation exploring soil erosion through the lens of eating, digestion and nourishment; Kinnomic Botany (2020–22), a film tracing the migratory epistemologies of the potato; and Making a Name (2022), a participatory installation renaming the vegetal world through touch, conversation and play.
Iman Datoo giving a talk in her 2024 exhibition Movement is Natural, Gray’s Wharf Gallery, Penryn, Cornwall, UK.
