Taking its name from the Saxon name for a storeroom, The Hoo Heddern is a travelling ‘library’ of food, housed in a mobile trailer, and a place dedicated to the seasons of the Hoo Peninsula.
Artist and food systems researcher Cherry Truluck is working with local residents to fill the Heddern with stories, recipes, oral histories, seeds, ingredients, and fragments of lived knowledge. Gathered and archived season by season, these contributions will form a living almanac – a record of what grows here, what is remembered here, and how food binds people to place over time: equal parts farming record, folklore compendium and speculative weather report. Borrowing from agricultural science, traditional almanacs and a dash of astrology, the project asks what it might mean to read the land as carefully as we read the stars.
At the heart of the project is a field of oats, sown on the Peninsula with a group of local young people. As the Heddern gathers stories, the oats gather light, rain, labour and care. Their slow passage from seed to harvest becomes both material and metaphor – a shared act of tending that anchors the project in the rhythms of soil and climate. The work leans deliberately into the temporalities of growing: waiting, uncertainty, repetition, collective effort, and eventual transformation.
Through Kitchen Table gatherings and seasonal events, residents, growers and young people will come together to reflect on past, present and future food practices – sharing meals, memories and practical knowledge. The oats, and the archive that grows alongside them, offer a way to reconsider what “seasonal” and “local” might mean in a time of industrial agriculture, climate instability and increasing food insecurity.
The Hoo Heddern marks the first stage of Cherry Truluck’s long-term project A Year Long Feast exploring community-led stewardship of land and food on the Hoo Peninsula, responding to the erosion of rural knowledge and heritage while cultivating new relationships rooted in care, continuity and collective nourishment.
A Year Long Feast: The Hoo Heddern has been commissioned by Cement Fields and supported by Medway Council through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF).
Cherry Truluck is an artist and researcher, who tends towards edible, convivial, collaborative and sometimes curatorial work.
Cherry’s transdisciplinary practice explores symbiosis, attunement and interdependence in more-than-human ecologies, as both an artistic strategy and methodology for collectively nourishing ourselves. Working with the land and the people close to it, she brings together plant science, communal eating, landwork and performance to create works which resonate with the rhythms and temporalities in the dialogue that food creates between the body and the land.
Since early 2022, Cherry’s research practice has centred particularly on the temporalities and rhythms within plant-breeding and growing processes, building on fieldwork with the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS), University of Aberystwyth. She investigates how these temporal dynamics might offer models for reciprocal relationships between human and more-than-human systems, opening possibilities for reimagining how societies, structures and systems organise in response to and collaboration with the environments they inhabit.
Cherry is part of the core organising team for pay-what-you-can community restaurant Canteen in Frome, Somerset. She is also a trustee and committee member at Horningsham Village Hall where she curates and hosts Rural Voices.