Scottish artist due Becky Little and Tom Morton have been working in Scotland through the LUNZ Hub Creative Collaborative Placement programme, linking with the James Hutton Institute, visiting a number of sites in the Eden Catchment, and meeting people whose ‘knowing comes from living and working with soils and land’. The initial prompt for the research was ‘The earth beneath our feet – understanding, regenerating, connecting’. Once Becky and Tom headed out, the direction of research and artwork quickly developed and there were some surprising changes from their original expectations. In this blog, Becky Little talks about their process, and the work they’ve produced in the last few months.
By Becky Little
“We began Parliament of Soils with a fairly simple proposition. We wanted to explore the soils of the River Eden catchment in Fife, our local river, not as a resource or something to use, but as individual soils with character, situated in particular places and living in relationship with people, water, and other beings.
The project was part of the Land Use for Net Zero (LUNZ) Creative Collaborative Placements programme, working with the James Hutton Institute. Tom Morton and I both came into it with experience of land, buildings and environmental questions, but from different directions. Tom has worked for many years in architecture and design, environmental policy and systems change. My own way in was through earth building and art, and a long practical relationship with soil as a creative material for making.
We started with maps of soil, geology and hydrology. The River Eden catchment gave us a boundary, but also something more interesting. Water moves through it, connecting places that might otherwise seem disparate and different. We chose eight soils: hill, bog, wood, field, garden, estuary, quarry and river. They weren’t intended to be representative soil types. We were interested in their individuality, and in finding people who lived or worked closely with each of them.
We thought we would interview those people using a set of carefully prepared questions. In fact, that method lasted about five minutes.
Conversation was much more interesting.
We talked with a farmer, archaeologist, quarryman, gardener and others whose knowing came from living and working with soils and land. Scientific knowledge was important to the project, but so were memory, observation and practical experience. There was a lot of storytelling too, and poetry at times. I was especially moved when Bill, the farmer, talked about his connection to the land and how that had changed: ‘At one time your every footstep told you what kind of soil you were in’. That stayed with us.
Gradually, listening became a much broader idea within the project because we were looking, touching, making, walking and paying attention to what happened around us – a call and response with the soil, which was also about responding to the texture and pulse of a place. Sometimes something very small shifted the work: an earthworm appearing in a circle of soil, a thin and melting layer of ice on a bog creating a bit of magic, the state of the tide, a particular quality of light or an unexpected phrase.
We also made a rule that our artwork should do no harm to the soils we were working with. Care and minimising harm were already part of our shared practice, but making ‘do no harm’ an explicit rule changed things. We couldn’t take material away and turn it into something else and we couldn’t put the soil into a test tube or sample bag. The constraint became surprisingly liberating. It made us look harder at what was already there and find imaginative ways of making with very little intervention.
For each soil we created a circular portrait. The circle became a frame or lens, but each one was made differently in response to what we found in each place. Alongside these we also made audio portraits from the conversations and a series of poems.
The poems became another collaboration within the collaboration. Tom and I responded separately at first, then brought our words together. We have quite different ways of thinking and writing, and sometimes different needs from the work. The poems emerged through negotiating those differences until it became difficult to say exactly whose words were whose. That seems important now. Relationship wasn’t only something we were investigating; it was part of how we worked.
One of the more difficult questions was how, or whether, to give soil a voice.
One of the more difficult questions was how, or whether, to give soil a voice. We didn’t want to pretend that we could speak for soil. But neither did we want the human voice to dominate. The poems move around this difficulty, slipping between soil, human voices, observation, memory and imagination.
Our plans changed in other ways too. Early on, we imagined gathering the eight soils together in a formal parliament. But as we listened to the individual voices, that began to feel self-conscious and unnecessary, so we chose a more organic way of working.
If you pay attention, you have to be prepared for what you hear or encounter to change what you do next.
That is perhaps one of the most useful things I have taken from the project. Listening has consequences. If you pay attention, you have to be prepared for what you hear or encounter to change what you do next. We didn’t want to collect material and fit it into a structure we had already decided upon. The project adapted to the people, soils, weather, creatures and places as we became more intimate with them.
Strange Kin and emerging patterns
The eight portraits eventually came together in Strange Kin, a film made with Matthew Robinson, accompanied by the poems and a publication, Parliament of Soils. Seen together, the individual soils also began to look like a community. Water runs between them, carrying matter and minerals through the catchment and eventually into the North Sea. Plants, animals and people move through them too. Their boundaries are porous and shifting.
There were other patterns emerging too. Often we noticed slow practices of care and repair with the soil: tending damaged ground, maintaining fertility, watching, and recovering. We also felt and saw tensions and discomfort around the ways soils were exhausted and under stress. Care and use were not easily separated, nor were dependence and depletion. Living and working with land was full of difficult compromises. The soils carried the consequences of all of this.
Living and working with land was full of difficult compromises.
The soils carried the consequences of all of this.
Becky Little introduces the film at a LUNZ Hub event in the James Hutton Institute, September 2026
A catalyst for ‘What Next?’
The Parliament itself hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it has become a prototype or catalyst for what might happen next. Could soils be given formal representation in decisions about places where their futures are contested? What would happen if soil wasn’t simply evidence or resource within a planning or land-use process, but a participant with interests of its own? There are precedents in Rights of Nature, Zoöp and Council of All Beings practices that make this less strange than it might initially sound.
… instead of seeing the Eden catchment as a landscape made up of parcels of land with different uses, we see movement, exchanges and dependencies …
The project certainly hasn’t given us any neat answers to ‘land use’ or Net Zero. If anything, it has made the questions more complicated. But instead of seeing the Eden catchment as a landscape made up of parcels of land with different uses, we see movement, exchanges and dependencies: water passing through soil and bodies, creatures making and remaking ground, human actions becoming part of much longer and larger material histories. What we would love to see is a more reciprocal way of looking after these soils and relations.
Perhaps the most important shift has been very simple. We started by looking for soils.
What we found were communities.”
An excerpt from the film Strange Kin, shared at the James Hutton Institute during a LUNZ Hub consortium meeting.
You can read more about Becky Little and Tom Morton’s placement here.
The film made by Becky Little and Tom Morton through the Creative Collaborative Partnership was premiered on Sunday 27th September, in Cupar Corn Exchange and online. They have also launched a book of poems.