Gardener's Bar: Worm Charming - Camden Art Centre

Worm charming, rural characters and queering the land with Georgia Gendall

Join us for a two-part event featuring Georgia Gendall. The evening will start with a talk by Gendall on her rural praxis, shedding light on her various animal collaborations, dedication to organising community worm-charming events, and continuous endeavour to queer the landscape.

For the second part of the event, the audience will be invited to venture into the garden for a worm-charming session by torchlight as night falls. Participants will require torches and worm-charming tools. The more inventive, the better! The goal is to send vibrations into the ground to charm the worms. However, please note that mechanical vibrators are not permitted.

For inspiration and ideas, visit Georgia’s worm-charming tool archive.

The Artist Gardener's Bar: Events Programme Images

The Artist

Georgia Gendall is an artist, facilitator and seasonal shepherd living and working in Cornwall. Rooted in the landscape, she eavesdrops on the lives of rural characters and the structures of their environment: worms, cows, potatoes, scarecrows, deer, gusts of wind, biscuits, kissing gates, the feeling of the inside of a ewe, and fields of grain – commune in her work. Using event structures, sculptures, performances, and videos, she brings these characters together through multi-sensory encounters that take delight in unravelling our preconceptions of the rural as idyll and subverting the familiar to embody queerness.

Georgia Gendall (b. Cornwall 1991). In 2023, Georgia was nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, received a Henry Moore Foundation Artists Award for sculpture and an Arts Council England Project Grant to run her project space Allotment Club and Falmouth Worm Charming Championships 2023. In 2022, Gendall was awarded the Peoples Choice Award and the Additional Award for her work in Exeter Open Contemporary.

Recent solo/group exhibitions/events/ commissions, and residences include: Falmouth Worm Charming Championships (2021 – 2023); Allotment Club, Penryn (2023); Exeter Open Contemporary, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2022); Stokkøyart, Norway (2022), Bothy Project, Scotland (2022), Thanks for the Apples, Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth (2021); When was the last time you lay down to look at the sky? Whitegold, St Austell (2020); In Other Words, Darling, Kestle Barton, Lizard, Cornwall & Auction House, Redruth, Cornwall (2019); also, also, also, Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable (2018)

Gardener's Bar: Events Programme

The Gardener’s Bar Events Programme comes from Tamara Henderson’s exhibition, Green in the Grooves.

This interdisciplinary programme of Garden Bar events is housed in a distinct artwork crafted from a garden shed.

Suitable for all ages, the programme intertwines art, film, poetry, and sound, exploring the bar’s role as a metaphor for composting. Here, contributors and audiences become the microorganisms fueling transformation and exchange.