'It Feels Like Going Back Home'
by Jessica Ashman
'It Feels Like Going Back Home' billboard by Jessica Ashman (2026)
The Bethnal Green Nature Reserve is excited to announce our latest 2026 billboard commission, It Feels Like Going Back Home by Jessica Ashman.
The artwork explores growing food and flowers as a bridge between landscape, cultural knowledge and the practices of tending land. At a time of rapid climate change, these relationships are increasingly under threat.
If traditional crops can no longer thrive as temperatures and growing conditions change, what happens to the cultural identities, memories and traditions woven through them? Food is central to how communities sustain and express culture, but what happens when the foods we grow, cook and share become harder to cultivate? These questions sit at the heart of Ashman’s work.
The title, It Feels Like Going Back Home, comes from a conversation with a plot holder at Bethnal Green Ecology Garden, the Nature Reserve’s food-growing garden. During her research, Ashman spoke with local growers about their experiences of tending their plots, the plants they grow, the recipes they make and the knowledge passed between generations.
She was particularly interested in the different names people give plants in their first languages, and how growing familiar crops can evoke a sense of place, memory and belonging.
Ashman says:
“As an allotment owner myself, I grow produce connected to my Jamaican heritage, so I’m interested in the ways cultivation can carry memories and knowledge across generations and between places. Speaking with local growers, I was struck by the emotional relationship people have with their plots and by the different ways they name, use and share what they grow. I was also interested in how these everyday practices are being affected by climate change, with growers already seeing extreme weather alter what they can cultivate.”
It Feels Like Going Back Home is made using acrylic ink, watercolour, silk dye scans and digital collage.
'It Feels Like Going Back Home' billboard by Jessica Ashman (2026)
With Just A Little Effort, Anything Is Possible by Jessica Ashman
To accompany her billboard artwork It Feels Like Going Back Home, Jessica Ashman has created an audio documentary and soundscape exploring how growing food and flowers can connect us to land, culture, community and traditions.
Recorded at Bethnal Green Ecology Garden in late June, the piece brings together the voices of local growers Sabia Khatun, Selina Akter, Zoe William, Sanzida Sultana, Hector Cuest, Grace Ihenacho, Rose Asaf and Ash Miah.
Their stories speak to the care, knowledge, memories and joy involved in tending the land... as well as what it means to grow food in the city during a changing climate.
The soundscape combines their voices with recordings from the garden, capturing a moment in the growing season during one of the hottest summers on record in the UK. Please scan the QR code to access the sound piece.
Jessica Ashman is a Black British interdisciplinary artist working across painting, natural dye, animation, textiles, music, performance and installation.
Rooted in her Jamaican and working-class heritage, Ashman’s practice explores how knowledge is collected, preserved and passed on. She is interested in dismantling the institutional archive as a gatekeeper of knowledge, and in the blurred spaces between fact and folklore, archival absence and cultural inheritance.
She is currently exploring histories of colonial botanical extraction in Jamaica and their relationship to contemporary diasporic connections with land and ecology in the Caribbean and UK.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Ashman’s work has been supported by Animate Projects, 198 Contemporary, Focal Point Gallery, New Art Exchange, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, and Modern Painters New Decorators.
Music & sound recording: Jessica Ashman @jessica_a_ashman
Interviews: Bethnal Green Ecology Garden, 27 June 2026
This artwork is part of our research into climate and adaptation, supported by City Bridge, Wellcome & King’s College London.