GrainCommons - SeedWays
GrainCommons is a transnational collaborative project connecting artistic practice, agriculture and cultural memory through grain.
It started as a collaboration between Denmark and Ireland, bringing together ikkeirute.art’s engagement with farming, milling and bread-making as artistic practice, alongside SeedWays’ focus on seed stewardship, community knowledge and ecological memory.
The project has since expanded to become a four-country partnership, with additional collaborators in Norway and Finland.
Working across field, harvest and kitchen, the project approaches seed and grain as culture rather than commodity, carried through memory, labour and story.
It brings together interconnected strands of agricultural archival research, community-engaged seed-based practice, and grain-focused inquiry.
Artistic creation sits at the centre of this process, fostering both cross-border cultural dialogue and strengthening European collaboration through shared agricultural heritage.
SeedWays
Anna King is Co-Lead Artistic Partner for SeedWays (Ireland). She brings to GrainCommons a participatory, field-based approach rooted in listening, relationship and ecological awareness.
Her work contributes to both the research and the creation of new artistic outputs, including visual, photographic and sensory-led works that emerge through direct engagement with land, seed and community.
SeedWays is a place-based art-research project exploring seed sovereignty, ecological memory, and the cultural life of seed in Ireland. It traces how seed and grain move through fields, seasons and shared rural practices, carried through memory, labour, story and place.
The project investigates seeds as both carriers of biological potential and living archives, holding the stories, rituals, and relationships of the people who have grown and saved them.
Rooted in field visits, community engagement, and contemplative art practice, SeedWays examines the relationships between land, seed, food and people. It asks how continuity, resilience, and adaptation can coexist without eroding the cultural knowledge that communities have carried across generations.
Through photography, sound, poetic reflection, visual art and participatory public gatherings, SeedWays creates space for dialogue between growers, seed guardians, farmers, millers, bakers, artists and the wider public.
As Ireland's contribution to the GrainCommons project, SeedWays seeks to strengthen Ireland's seed heritage by supporting intergenerational knowledge, community stewardship and the shared cultural practices that sustain living seed traditions for future generations.
Memory re-emerging through cycles of growth, decay and renewal.
One of the project's central tensions is the relationship between preservation and change. Seeds must adapt to shifting ecological conditions, yet adaptation can also lead to the loss of locally rooted knowledge, practices and relationships when disconnected from place-based stewardship.
SeedWays explores participatory, commons-based approaches to adaptation, asking how communities can respond to ecological uncertainty without surrendering sovereignty or losing the slow wisdom embedded in their seed traditions.
GrainCommons is currently in development, with an expanding network of partners.
Denmark Partner
ikkeirute.art - Copenhagen: Sacramento Roselló, Letícia Stallone & Claudia Adeath.
Semilla | Frø | Seed | Насіння is an audiovisual project exploring bread as both daily ritual and cultural document. It traces wheat’s journey from seed to sustenance through fieldwork, photography, film and sound, forming a multi-sensory archive of memory, resilience and shared food heritage.
Ireland
SeedWays, led by Anna King, explores seed stewardship, ecological memory and intergenerational knowledge through participatory, field-based practice and sensory-led artistic work.
Additional Partners in Finland & Norway. More on this coming soon.
(Images by Anna King)