Labour of Love presents insights from gardening practice undertaken over four years between 2019-23 at Chiswick House and Gardens, the birthplace of the English Landscape Movement. By drawing on the history of dance and embodied movement, this practice-based research approaches historic gardens as choreographic objects (William Forsythe) and conceives gardening as a form of choreographic dwelling (Gretchen Schiller/Sarah Rubidge).
It tests how choreographic thinking could permeate creative practice and generate new knowledge about labour and social capital involved in the care and maintenance of historic landscape designs. This practice is set to challenge how gardens can be experienced. It explores choreography as an embodied way of organising knowledge to rethink historic landscapes as objects of material culture and 'meeting places of nature and human labour (Chandra Mukerii)