Key details
Location
- Battersea
-
The Hangar
Price
- Free
Who can attend
- Everyone
Type
- Exhibition
SustainLab RCA presents Following Fallowing, society’s annual and Royal College of Art’s biggest exhibition showcasing environmentally-conscious works, including Schools of Arts & Humanities, Design, and Communications.
In a contemporary era defined by productivity, speed, and measurable outcomes, stopping is often perceived as a sign of stagnation. Yet the agricultural practice of fallowing, the intentional resting of land to restore its vitality, maintain ecological balance, and prepare for future cultivation, offers another perspective. Fallowing is not simply a pause in output; it is an active, cyclical process that sustains long-term fertility, resilience, and care.
Following Fallowing draws on this principle to reconsider the relationship between rest, creativity, and sustainability. Rather than framing rest as withdrawal or inactivity, the exhibition positions it as a fundamental condition for making, a generative interval through which ideas mature, systems recalibrate, and practices renew themselves. In doing so, it asks: What might creative resilience look like if we valued cycles of pause as much as cycles of production?
Bringing together artists, designers, and creative practitioners from the Royal College of Art, the exhibition engages fallowing across diverse media, including painting, photography, sculpture, interactive installation, and video. Through material choices, temporal processes, and spatial interventions, the participants explore cycles of depletion and regeneration, labour and latency, presence and withdrawal. Rest is approached not as a temporary interruption but as a methodology, one embedded within ecological, intellectual, and artistic systems.
At a moment when creative and ecological exhaustion feel increasingly visible, Following Fallowing invites visitors to consider rest as an essential practice of sustainability. Just as soil must lie fallow to recover its fertility, our cultural and creative ecosystems require intervals of stillness to remain alive. The exhibition proposes that resilience does not emerge from constant acceleration, but from the courage to pause, restore, and begin again.
Preview & Opening: Saturday 28 March, 12–8 pm
Closing Event & Ecollegey Festival: 9 April, 2–9.30 pm
General Public: 28 March (12–8 pm), 8, 9 April (2–9.30 pm)
RCA Staff & Students Only: 30, 31 March, 1 April
Closed during college closure: 2–7 April 2026
