Speed is Consuming Us: Should We Be Following Fallowing?

A Review of SustainLab RCA’s 2026 Exhibition

Fallowing: The ancient practice of leaving agricultural land unseeded after ploughing, to rest and regain fertility for future crops.  

In April, the SustainLab RCA hosted their annual exhibition in RCA Battersea’s immense Hangar Gallery. Turning to ancient folk practices as a framework and methodology is a decisively fresh approach to curating this year’s entries. Following Fallowing rejects the bitter taste of over-consumption and positions rest as a necessary and valuable process. Following Fallowing reminds us that we are nature. Sustainability is truly a cyclical and mutual process; when we care for the planet, we care for ourselves.  

It’s clear that RCA’s students are tired of the overly hyper-productive systems that consume our very beings. Exhibiting artists embrace fallowing in brilliant and surprising ways. They reject the modern hurry and over-consumption in favour of slowness and sustainability. Being a human doesn’t feel like such a badge of honour anymore—maybe it’s time we return to our roots.        A seamless merging of the human and the natural is predominant—a cohesion echoed in the show’s curation. “We were taken by surprise by the artists’ response to our theme.” Says Mehak Maharia, one of the show’s team of talented curators. “There were so many works we just weren’t expecting. All the works are so different, yet everything merges together really well. That surprised us.”  

The gallery is flooded with material innovations. It’s clear that this year’s students view materiality as fundamental to practice. Materials are pushed and stretched to their limits, warped and subverted and unravelled. The exhibition showcases how resistance seeps through into creative practices of the RCA’s makers and thinkers. Unconventional ideas of sustainability quietly permeate the college’s collective consciousness.   

Every bite we take of the natural world leaves waste—valuable resources left behind. Despite the bustling Battersea Bridge being a far cry from the Nottinghamshire countryside, this is where Mud Collective source their materials. They create art from discarded British fleece, sourced directly from farms, to highlight the issue of wasted resources. In the UK, wool is now a Class 3 waste product. Agricultural waste is usually invisible, but The Wool We Waste project renders it tangible. 

The rushed pace of modern life is detrimental to the sustainability of us as people. We cannot sustain ourselves without room to rest—without fallowing. Traditional material processes like knitting and weaving sit alongside numerous digital innovations that are distinctly modern. In Sahithya Mahadevan’s piece The Still Observer, the person viewing the screen must stand completely still before birds gradually appear. Mimicking the slow experience of birdwatching, it is surprisingly difficult to stop and stand still. I could not manage it long enough for the birds to appear.   

 

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Natural wood grain seeps through into Conni McKenzie’s photograph Where the Wild Watches. The unusual wood surface creates a swirling undercurrent that ripples through the image’s blue sky. “This was my first time printing on wood”, says McKenzie, “I love the way the wood and the picture interact; the materials are in dialogue.”    

McKenzie’s own body is photographed in dialogue with the natural world. A small figure within a scorched Californian landscape, the work came to be during a period of rest on a solo hike up Mount Diablo. It is a direct result of fallowing.  

“We are nature”, says McKenzie. The photograph encourages a closer embrace between humans and the natural world. “My work is about finding that symbiosis, where nature and person mesh. With the climate justice movement, first and foremost, it’s about reminding ourselves that we are nature.”  

Within the picture’s simple framing, McKenzie also asks, “who is a person of nature?” How does gender or race affect our relationship with the natural world? “I think a lot of that has to do with colonial history, of who owns the land.” McKenzie strips herself bare for her work, literally removing her clothes because they are “markers of humanness.” 

It begs the question, why have we chosen to remove ourselves so far from the natural world? There are so many factors, from the political to the digital. McKenzie reminds us to step back into the land, to rest, to sit with it, and to allow ourselves to heal.                 

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When we take that last bite of a piece of fruit, discarding its skin or core, we rarely notice what goes to waste. Nefeli Vitoriaki gives scrapped fruit skins a new life.

“Fruit skin is so beautiful, but we discard it every day”, says Vitoraki. Vitoraki’s innovative fruit skin leather caught my eye in the exhibition as one of the most inventive material innovations. “I wanted it to replicate leather. The reason we love leather so much is because it's so natural and beautiful and imperfect. So why not do the same for fruit skin?”  

Vitoraki’s designs don’t look like leather, they have their own distinct quality. The fruit skin is nobbly, sewn together in gloriously irregular patchwork with distinct spiky, zigzagging stitches. The wobbly and imperfect is embraced. Each piece brims with character and, by design, is totally unique.   

Aside from being aesthetically exciting, the work is also deeply personal. “The project started initially as an exploration of this fruit called salak. It is native to Bali, Indonesia, which is where my mother is from.” Her sensitive blending of her heritage with deep environmental care has garnered attention. The works we see in the show—their first time exhibited—have since won Vitoraki a place at this year’s MRE (Materials Research Exchange). She is excited to tell me that she’s just been selected as part of Green Grads 2026.   

I ask her about her future plans. She tells me, “I ideally want to travel to Indonesia to source the fruit directly from factories that discard this fruit daily. I think that's my biggest goal—small-scale, handmade production of the fruit and the textile.” Vitoraki has big ambitions, and it seems that Following Fallowing has given her the much needed confidence to pursue her ideas.  

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Elina Yumasheva plays and pushes the boundaries of painting. And there’s more to it than meets the eye. Influenced by a perceptive interest in philosophy, Yumasheva’s work derives from post-human theories around entanglement. She explains it to me:

“It’s largely driven by Karen Barad, the physicist who argues that matter is indeterminate. In post-human theories, everything is considered entangled and interconnected at the quantum level.”  

Yumasheva’s canvases are eerie and deeply evocative. Colours clash yet blend and create a sense of space, confusion, dissonance, disruption. Ideas of New Materialism form the work’s core. “I’m inspired by these philosophical ideas. My interest here is to translate them in a poetic way, often capturing that moment of not here, not there.”    

The works are enquiring into the concept of matter through a painting process, but there is a mystifying twist: she paints with bacteria. Yumasheva’s two works in the exhibition are both made with bacteria, but in different ways. All bacteria is grown under strict conditions in the RCA’s biolab. It is a long and precise process. For one work she grows the bacteria directly onto silk. “It penetrates the proteins of the silk, and stains it. Then I neutralise and wash it,” she says. For the rest of her work on canvas, the bacteria is cultivated in a Petri dish. Once grown, it’s scooped out, neutralised with alcohol, and dried out to form a pigment.  

The bacteria—Janthinobacterium lividum—creates the striking deep purple pigment that we see whispering through the painting’s surface. It’s enchanting.  

Deep consideration and intentionality of materials is the unforeseen response to Following Fallowing. Yumasheva’s work is an example. Beyond the painting’s aesthetics, she uses only non-toxic materials, including Old Masters’ techniques for washed linseed oil, mixing pigments and making her own oil ground. Many paintings exhibited share this sentiment and experiment with environmentally conscious use of materials.  

How can we continue to make, to produce, to create, without further destroying our planet? The majority of oil painting mediums contain harmful solvents, while acrylic paints contain microplastics that can easily escape into water and soil, with heavy consequences. Oil paint pigment itself can contain harmful heavy metals like lead or cadmium. What is the impact of this, too, on artists working with them?

Students at the RCA benefit from a network of support in their sustainable practices. Material grants encourage students to experiment with sustainable and unconventional materials. The college’s team of technicians—often overlooked as they’re not public-facing—are advocates for material experimentation and an invaluable resource of knowledge and experience.    

This is the moment we collectively decide to reject over-production, and stop letting the speed of life consume us. All artworks on show innovate materials, work with waste products, or teeter between the political and personal. Most of all, I leave convinced to start savouring rest: to Follow Fallowing.

 Nik Macey, April 2026