austen camille

Shared Fields is a sprawling, multimedia, multidisciplinary project that has taken place over the course of a year on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Between April 2024-June 2025, I interviewed over 60 land stewards in the region - farmers, conservationists, watermen, birders, hunters, scientists, teachers, food systems workers - and developed a manuscript, public programming, an exhibition and a community meal. With Shared Fields, I was interested in the subject of soil health from these numerous perspectives, as soil itself is such a complex entity that it requires a diversity of viewpoints to even begin talking about it.

What follows is a range of documentation from the year:

The shared meal, held on May 18th 2025, took place at Wildly Native Flower Farm. I collaborated with emerging chef Jesse Townshend of Hedgerow Culinary, and we sourced all of the ingredients from the farmers who I’ve been working with this last year. I made all of the plateware and vases, based on the first conversation I had with farmer Liza Goetz of Wildly Native. And folks in attendance had contributed both stewardship resources (included in a small publication) and questions to ask of one another (written all along the tablecloth).

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Excerpts from the manuscript can be found in the following publications:

Blazing Star Journal

Journal of Black Mountain College Studies (forthcoming fall 2025)

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Work from Shared Fields was presented at Future Harvest’s annual conference, Farming Into the Future, as a keynote reading.

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During the exhibition O-Horizon, I organized and moderated a panel discussion entitled Leading with Curiosity in Land Stewardship with guests Trey Hill (Harborview Farms), Judy Gifford (St Brigid’s Farm), Liza Goetz (Wildly Native Flower Farm) and Francis Smith (Maryland DNR).

All of the work for Shared Fields was generously supported by the Kent Cultural Alliance, the Campbell Foundation, the Chesapeake Bay Trust, the Joseph Robert Foundation and AgArts. It takes a village.