Sean Roy Parker

      • I work open-endedly across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, cooking, foraging, publishing, workshops and community gardening. Though it has been labelled with Social Practice before, I prefer to think of it as Living Practice as it requires daily maintenance of nourishing relationships with diverse human and more-than-human collaborators, eg housemates, employers, plants, worms and microbes. In the spirit of degrowth most things I make get shared or eaten, composted or repurposed.

        Services Available

        Residency Artist-Cook 

        Consultancy for ecological land management

        1-on-1 Professional Arts Mentoring

      • I have five years of experience cooking low-impact meals using fresh, local and salvaged ingredients at art residencies and live projects, including The Field (Derbyshire), Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge), original projects (Great Yarmouth), Bündner Rigi (Lumnezia), Niki (Hannover).

        • Intuitive, resourceful and flavour-forward approach 
        • Working with organic farms, wild food and commercial surplus
        • Conferring with programme to deliver appropriate meal structure
        • Engaging with residents / participants to share labour and responsibility
        • Accessible on-site fermentation workshops for all abilities
        • Gardening knowledge for harvesting herbs and crops
        • Foraging walks to collect seasonal and abundant free plants
        • Cooking with the elements ie using fire, water, wind, earth
        • Scavenging materials and designing lo-tech equipment ie dehydrator

      • For seven years I have been developing practical horticultural skills and expertise while volunteering at community gardens, studying Permaculture Design and growing organic vegetables. Using these findings I have designed and implemented a Food Forest at Shipley Woodside Community Garden, and created a land plan with a B&B in Northumbria.

        • Permaculture Design Course and Teacher Training certificates
        • Self-Directed Study for Permaculture Diploma 2026-28 (tbc)
        • Site-wide design integrating bioregional observations and long-term goals
        • Working collaboratively with urgency in the climate crisis
        • Creative management of Input and Output streams to minimise costs and impact
        • Complete composting systems and teaching functional care plan
        • Forming relationships with local suppliers to find surplus materials
        • Experience of developing Environmental Action Plans for institutes
        • Design and preparation for seasonal food growing spaces
        • Food preservation and cooking tutorials or public workshops

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      •    I leave the food bank trembling and numb

        questioning the success of a three hour sit down

        what are the preconditions of public art?

        I am so fucking disoriented

                                 I sit at the waters’ edge for an hour

        watch miniature sparkling ripples on what

        looks like chocolate milk

                   I am always thinking of food

        always planning my next meal, never going without.

        I am fat with shame

                              - excerpt from “Artist-in-Residence


        In Your Own Time: Artist as Witness to Mutual Aid Disguised at Social Care is a self-published collection of experimental poems and critical reportage by artist Sean Roy Parker, written while digesting the complexity and hypocrisy of the position ‘Socially-Engaged Artists’ are often held by their employers in relation to marginalised groups whilst unable to meet their own needs. This project captures the ambience of a welfare system in chaos, and the affect of disparities imbued by cultural funding on its subjects. The artist was in residence at Erith Food Bank, south east London, when it was abruptly closed in May 2025.

        IYOT’s design language is informed by DIY zines and activist pamphlets unearthed during research trips to anarchist archives and community libraries across Britain, including Sparrow’s Nest (Nottingham), 56a Infoshop (London), 1-in-12 Club (Bradford). Designer Lu Fraser’s multivocal approach blends ephemera from Parker’s visits to the food bank, found archival material and scavenged digital whimsy, as well as original drawings. It was edited by writer and facilitator Priya Jay, and printed in risography by Pagemasters.

        This publication marks the culmination of an 18-month project commissioned by Three Rivers Bexley as part of Back To Basics, a programme of three concurrent artist-led research projects exploring basic public services in the borough. It was devised by Scott Burrell with support from Chiara Famengo, and funded as part of Creative People and Places by Arts Council England.

        Thanks to Lizzie Graham and Meera Shakti Osborne for their insight and advice, and all the staff, volunteers and visitors at Erith Food Bank for their patience and openness.

        Note: Both the artist and organisation have agreed to write separate press releases to respect the different experiences of the project.


        Written and produced by Sean Roy Parker @fermental_health

        Designed by Lu Fraser @wetbog.jpg

        Edited by Priya Jay @internetprayer

        Printed by PageMasters, Lewisham @pagemasters.co

        Run of 100

        4-colour risograph on Context Birch and sugar paper

        40 pages, singer sewn

        285x203mm

        Includes a 4-colour risograph poster and bookmark

        Publication date 17/11/2025


        Distribution

        A key purpose of this publication is to stimulate overdue conversation around particular types of artwork and cultural labour that are becoming more prevalent and compromising for freelancer and ‘Socially-Engaged’ artists.. Copies are being distributed to ‘caretaker’ organisations across the UK and Ireland, and beyond, to be held In Common Trust. From these locations, it is hoped the publication will stir conversations and actions which will appear in wider public programming to be explored with local mutual aid groups and diverse audiences. If you are affiliated with an artist-run organisation or institute that could become a ‘caretaker’ and host an event around this topic, please get in touch.

      • A social eating and cultural heritage project with Jonas Palekas (LT), commissioned for Audra Festival, Kaunas, Lithuania

        13-21 September 2025

        “Preparing food is a form of love, eating together builds connection, and historically eateries like canteens, bakeries, restaurants or bars are where meals, stories and life happens. Against a backdrop of worsening effects of climate crisis and deepening alienation from each other and our environment, Citizen Sandwich grew from a city’s precarious relationship with food in late capitalism and post-Soviet trauma, and demonstrates ideas for healing; using pre-modern technology to extend food lifespans; educating on digestive and herbal plant identification; organising communal scavenging for street fruit; all ways of forging relationships with lost knowledges and curious people.

        Centred around a makeshift bakery and artist-run canteen situated inside the Kaunas Picture Gallery, Citizen Sandwich served a menu across multiple locations during the festival. Driven by roaming research and the vernacular of Kaunas life, the project offered affordable hot dishes and bar snacks prepared using the finest meat, dairy, grains and vegetables from local producers alongside the artists’ handmade ferments and preserves of wild and urban abundance.

        The menu fluctuated depending on ingredients available to-hand and intuitive thinking from cooks, blending recipes from Lithuania’s cultural heritage with international specialities influenced by migrant communities living in Kaunas. Meals were served from the kitchen of the legendary Kultūra Bar, from an iron grill by the forts at Šilainiai Gardens, and from a tent in the car park of “Pergalė” factory. A specially-designed prep kitchen was installed by ‘Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture’ in a former cloakroom between the gallery and the bar, where communal activities like talks and workshops took place. It was adorned with an archive of traditional basketry and enamelware, borrowed from an apartment in Žaliakalnis, as well as fridges stocked with homemade pickles, ferments and condiments for the menu and public consumption.

        Parker and Palekas invited artists and practitioners working with food from the Baltic region and beyond to form the kitchen team and present their work in a form that fitted; Koekeittiö, a collective from Helsinki, opened the festival with a performance featuring a procession of flat breads and chocolate, “Koekeittiö Rieska Service”; Aga Pokrywka, a Polish-born Finnish-based artist, recorded the guts of a podcast for Ferment Radio; Gintarė Ramančionytė, from Vilnius, ran a kitchen service and taught strangers how to make dumplings; Izabelė Šuikaitė taught a workshop on DIY mushroom growing at home, while Kristin Wiking, both also from Vilnius, baked breads using waste coffee grounds and local flour; Moira Tirtha, from Australia, cooked a three-course Indonesian feast, called “Nasi Tumpeng”; Liudvikas Buklys and Vytas Narbutas contributed traditional Lithuanian items for the menu – pupusas stuffed with meats or beans and cheese, and dark rye sourdough loaves.

        Citizen Sandwich was alive in real time, bubbling up against modernist architecture and swelling audiences, showing the inner workings of the operation on the outside; an ambitious project striving to capture the flavours of a city in flux.”

        Commissioner: Tautvydas Urbelis

        Project Manager: Liucina Mackialo

        Social Media: Kamilë Navardauskaitė

        Lead Artists: Sean Roy Parker & Jonas Palekas

        Invited Artists: Koekeittiö, Aga Pokrywka, Gintarė Ramančionytė, Izabelė Šuikaitė, Kristin Wiking, Moira Tirtha, Liudvikas Buklys, Vytas Narbutas

      • Unique bespoke rug, hand-tufted in 100% British Wool backed with loom state cotton, wild herb extractions

        1.5m x 1.5m

        Sean Roy Parker and Laura Derby
        Exhibited in A Reason For Flowers at Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne
        Commissioned by Edward Ball
        April 2025

        A ‘guild’ in permaculture practice, undoubtedly copied from Indigenous landworkers as much of the methodology is, relates to a polyculture planted around existing or new tree bases. They commonly comprise species from the remaining canopy layers (dwarf trees, shrubs, herbs, rhizome, ground cover and climbers) which provide complementary functions to support the tree's growth. Examples are pollinators, pest repellents, colourful, odorous or medicinal flowers, and when selected for harmony can produce many useful yields. Guilds also benefit from a layer of mulch like dead leaves, woodchip or wool to retain moisture and deter critters.

        In 2024, while working on tree guild designs for a community garden in Shipley, Derbyshire, Parker scanned in his pen on paper drawings and accidentally processed them through the content aware scale tool. For this project, he approached Laura Derby, a hand-tufter based in Kirkcudbright, SW Scotland to translate one of the digital images into a rug using only 100% British wool yarn on cones already in her studio. This not only reduced material costs and incorporated materials otherwise commercially obsolete, it also invited Laura to interpret the texture of the scrambled drawing, adding another layer of encryption. 

        The rug is surrounded by tinctures, balms and tea blends made by Parker from wild and cultivated plants known for their protective and restorative properties.

        This new work was commissioned by Devonshire Collective for this exhibition, giving Parker the opportunity to dig through his archive of imagery generated while working in community gardens over the last several years, and collaborate with a professional heritage craftsperson.

      • “stewarding maps the joyful and embodied ways we can resist the structures that control our food, housing, and socialisation. We begin in an abandoned school, previously the union headquarters for a coal board, which became a legal guardianship, now condemned. We witness acts of communing between human inhabitants, composting worms, microbes in fermentation, and learn working class histories along the way. Here, complex networks emerge and thrive, disrupting the monolithic power of corporate extraction. Sean Roy Parker’s debut collection of poetry is a generous account of hopeful ways to eat and ways to live.”

        Published 22 November 2024
        Designed by S.S. Whetton / Design Print Bind
        52pp, 140mm x 215 mm
        with b&w photos, plant dyed covers

        Making of..

        “From the outset of the publication, we had spoken about giving the covers some hand treatment, which reflects the way I work in my visual practice and validates my obsession with touching as many parts of the process as possible. I started off by poorly tracing the original title design and rendering in a way that it seemed to be decomposing. I drew another version, just the outline, for the inside title. Then, I tested some plant-based inks (made by artist Fran Disley), alcohol dye extractions, and fresh flower petals on spare stock to observe how they adhered and ensure there was no warping. The execution proper was done on the floor of the Monitor Books studio in east London, using a complement of colour inks (blackberry, butterfly pea, walnut husk, turmeric) and brush styles that Sonia had brought in. My friend Josh had also given me a rubber mallet and some fresh calendula flowers when I visited his allotment in Sydenham the previous day. We hammered the petals between two covers to double coverage and speed up the process, and set up a small production line to interleave the finished covered with newsprint for blotting, weighing them down with boxes of unbound books. Once dry, Sam fabricated a guide to accurately punch the holes in the spines and Rory selected two different threads to match the colour scheme.”

        ‘stewarding is full of sensitive advice and astute observations for scavengers, foragers, worms farmers, and citizen scientists; you'll need this when you are knee-deep in last year's dirt and dead flowers.’
        – Lars Holdhus, Degrowth For Artists

        ‘Between verses, I am soon found reading with the worms and the squeaking cabbage, laughing with renegade tomatoes. In stewarding, Sean Roy Parker draws us closer to the ground, to the overlooked and discarded, where he points to the absolute worthiness of life. Conviviality gathers around bruised produce with spoons, as green names invoke our own familiar places, each poem surrenders anew to an innate pace and the responsibility of with-ness. Read aloud, yes, I live amongst, I live amongst!’
        – Priya Jay, writer and facilitator

        ‘Evocative, sharply observed, and sneakily funny, stewarding is an exploration of the human relationship with plants through the senses and feelings of someone who experiences it with remarkable depth. Sean Roy Parker’s creation is a unique and beautiful thing.’
        – Claire Ratinon, author of Unearthed