About the project

What do we gather, harvest, and give thanks for today? HARVEST is an ongoing research and knowledge exchange project led by Charles Holland and Cat Rossi in collaboration with UCA colleagues.

Framed by the climate emergency, it investigates a reconnection with growing, seasonality, and harvesting materials and resources amongst contemporary architects and designers. It explores the design cultures, behaviours, and rituals that emerge in a changed relationship with the land, the local, and each other. 

The collaborative and interdisciplinary project has consisted of two components so far: a HARVEST festival organized for the 2025 Folkestone Triennial and HARVEST MOON, a design research project conducted in collaboration with Local Works studio. Please get in touch with Charles or Cat if you would like to discuss current or future HARVEST research.

HARVEST Festival, Summer – Autumn 2025 

HARVEST was a public programme organised for the 2025 Folkestone Triennial How Lies The Land, culminating in a Harvest Festival held on 5th October 2025 (Harvest Sunday). It consisted of:

  • A harvest-themed poster series commissioned by artist and UCA Reader in Photography Steffi Klenz with artworks and texts by Nicky Coutts, JJ Charlesworth, Charles Holland, Katie Jolin, Steffi Klenz, Rob Roach, Cat Rossi, and Fredie Yauner, distributed for free to selected Folkestone households. Digital versions of the posters can be found below:
  • A family workshop at local multidisciplinary studio SD Projects, facilitated by gardener Bid Tophill and organised with architect Lettice Drake. The workshop invited participants to create a miniature dream garden, a first step towards SD Project’s aim to create a community garden on their rooftop.
  • Artist, curator and producer Diane Dever led a Harvest-themed Triennial tour of artworks that variously dug into or were built from the earth, and which expressed ideas of ritual and symbolism, linking to harvest festivals’ celebratory social practices.
  • A salon featuring six practitioners across art, architecture and design whose work resonates with the HARVEST theme: Studio Tip, Tom Emerson (6a), Daniel Fernández Pascual (Cooking Sections), Miranda Vane, Local Works, and Shahed Saleem. Collectively the salon showed how a harvest-based approach means rejecting single use processes, finite materials or endings and welcoming processes and ways of thinking and acting that are about stewardship, environmental interdependence, and seasonal, annual, and deep time durations. A recording can be found here.
  • A “Folk Rave” with musician Anna Braithwaite at Urban Room. Eerie noises, feet stomping, a single accordion note and Anna’s voice gave an appropriate sense of harvest’s mystical and material qualities.

HARVEST MOON, Winter 2025 – ongoing

HARVEST MOON is a collaborative project researching biomaterials and questions of seasonality, natural processes, and community gathering in contemporary architecture and design. Conducted in collaboration with Local Works studio, Steffi Klenz and Stephen Knott, Director of the Crafts Study Centre, it focuses on the design and fabrication of a table that advances the application, knowledge, and understanding of harvested biomaterials on the east Kent coast. The design research process will lead to a table designed to facilitate a series of Harvest Gatherings starting in 2026, to enable a range of communities to gather and celebrate what they value in their environment today.

Project team

Partners

Funders

  • Creative Folkestone
  • De Haan Foundation
  • UCA Knowledge Exchange internal funding

Outcomes & outputs

  • Curated programme: family workshop, artwork tour, salon, harvested biomaterials knowledge exchange workshop (forthcoming) and Harvest gatherings (forthcoming).
  • HARVEST poster series (curated by Steffi Klenz): Four double-sided posters featuring specially commissioned artworks and essays.
  • HARVEST MOON table (forthcoming).

Impacts & recognition 

  • Industry Impact: This project is designed to demonstrate the potential of biomaterials within the architecture and design industries, specifically through the development of design language. Though the importance of biomaterials and sustainable models of material production and use have been widely researched, this project focuses on how new forms of design language and functionality can evolve from these techniques.
  • Regional Impact: The project’s portability is designed to allow it to become the focus for events in specific locations regionally, impacting on communities in Canterbury, Dover and Folkestone and developing new communal networks.
  • Knowledge Exchange: The development of the table is designed to provide opportunities for knowledge exchange between stakeholders including staff and students at Canterbury School of Art, Architecture and Design, practitioners such as Local Works, the Craft Study Centre and partner organisations including Creative Folkestone and Dover Arts Development.
  • Network Development: The project will enable and build on existing and emerging networks including UCA and Creative Folkestone and Dover Arts Development, and the Craft Study Centre. This network will be developed through specific and targeted events including making workshops, exhibitions, events including Harvest Festival-focused gatherings, lectures and articles.