Unearthing to Rewild, Remember, Look Forward

What kind of biodiversity can lawn ecosystems support? This fall, Lawn Lab offers a meditative audio tour for slowing down and tuning in to the urban rewilding taking place at the lawn next door to Media Sanctuary’s Collard City Growers.

The twenty minute audio tour guides you through simple activities for engaging with Lawn Lab’s six experimental plots before they go dormant for the winter. What was here before? What might be here in the future? How should humans—you, me, this community?—shape the urban habitat

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Our FALL AUDIO TOUR for the 3333 Sixth Avenue plots is live! Break the (phyto)social distance before the plants sleep for the winter. Learn more here. For additional info, contact artist Ellie Irons at When you complete the tour, please send your plant portraits, mailing address, and any comments to [email protected].

ABOUT

The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory is an ongoing art-science experiment now in its third season. A project of the NEXT EPOCH SEED LIBRARY, it involves re-wilding interventions in institutional and residential lawns from seeds lying dormant in the soil. From plant-based sculptures and community science workshops to novel approaches to data collection and presentation, the project offers multiple entry points through which to consider lawn habitats and their impacts on the communities—human and nonhuman—who live in and among them.

Season 1 (2018) took place in institutional and residential lawns throughout the city of Troy, NY. Season 2 (2019) took place at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and Seton Hall University in New Jersey. The 2020 season was planned for plots at RPI, The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and Radix Sustainability Center. It has been scaled back due to the pandemic, to six plots in a lawn near The Sanctuary for Independent Media in North Central Troy.

Follow project progress at #lawnredisturbancelaboratory. City Lab wrote about the project in September 2019: Uncovering the Seeds of a Post-Lawn Future. In August 2020, Media+Environment’s “Mediating Art and Science” Stream published Ellie’s article about the project’s first season: The Next Epoch Seed Library’s Lawn Lab: A Public Experiment in Collaboration with Seeds, Time, and Weeds. Also in August 2020, Ellie presented the project with a 5 minute lightening talk for the Ecological Society of America’s annual conference.

Ellie Irons is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York. She works in a variety of media, from video to workshops to re-wilding experiments, to reveal how human and more-than-human lives intertwine with other earth systems. Her recent work focuses on plants, people and urban ecosystems in the so-called Anthropocene. She is a cofounder of the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency. Irons received her BA from Scripps College in Los Angeles and her MFA from Hunter College, CUNY in New York. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she is researching the intersection of socially engaged art, community science, and urban ecology as a means for envisioning and enacting multispecies solidarity in the face of climate chaos.

We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.