My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.” 

There are two kinds of decay: cyclical and linear. The decay of organic matter is a fruitful transformation, rich in nitrogenous processes that catalyse fertile ground for creation. This microbial process occurs in the liminal in-between world and womb of our soils, a space from which we have alienated our cognitive and material selves in favour of exploitation, domination, and desecration. Cyclical decay, seen in organic matter, transforms death into fertile ground through microbial processes, enabling life. The onset of human-induced linear decay disrupts this essential cyclical dance of death and promised restoration, bringing its own prophecy of total biome collapse and, with it, our global food systems. With no exchange offered, no microbial or other life can await the other side of this crisis now termed Anthropocene. Viewing Ozymandias becomes an uncomfortable exercise in déjà vu as we are confronted with a warning from a decayed superstructure, lost in desert lands to our own, promising "lone and level sands stretching far away" should our soils and wider environment continue to be lost via the very industrial processes contemporaneous to the 19th-century publication of Ozymandias. Current environmental reports, such as the UNEP’s 2023 Adaptation Gap Report, highlight the dire inadequacies in climate response, emphasizing the need for a multifaceted, "poly-response" approach. However, these reports do not consider the seeds that planted this gap and where they lie buried in the human state: what cognitive, material, and consequent relational gaps are responsible for this inadequacy of adaptation, and where do we need to plant new growth to close such a gap? The notion of "adaptation" represents a gap while also implying an inherent grief, a deeply personal emotion tied to the reconciliation of loss with a new reality that falls beyond the fallacy of "sustainability." Posthumanist and new materialist ideologies blossoming across this gap advocate for a fundamental shift in our interactions with the environment. Ferrier’s urns also provide fertile ground for one such framework, found in Tim Ingold’s "Trust to Domination" paradigm. 

The notion of Domination, while a recurrent theme under posthumanism, has not been explicitly addressed as a specific interpretive lens through which to view material adaptations and responses to the Anthropocene crisis. Viewed this way, Ferrier’s urns activate a powerful Metanoia, a transformation of mind and heart to serve as a cross-disciplinary artistic endeavour and functional soil restorative, fostering a tangible unity between mind and material and a reversal shift in human>nature relations from one of ‘Domination’ to ‘Trust’. Storytelling is crucial for this transformation, as Jacques Le Goff notes, imagination can create outcomes and determine material facts whilst Ben Rawlence, director of radical education institute Black Mountains College emphasizes that stories must reflect cumulative world changes to create a new one. This requires a new language grounded in tangible relational meanings of matter, affirming Wittgenstein’s idea that the power of language lies in its use and understanding, not the logical structures underpinning it. Ferrier’s Urns embody this new language of Ingold’s in their activation of Trust. Ingold asserts that “to trust is to act with a being [nature] in mind with expectation, but no guarantee, of reciprocation” emphasizing that trust involves the concurrent acceptance of risk, to trust that the environment, if respected and nurtured, will likewise respect and nurture in return. Any attempt to harm or control natural biomes, as between lovers, represents a betrayal of that trust and a return to a relationship marked by dominance. If trust represents a “peculiar combination of autonomy and dependency” it indicates that any material intervention must respect this autonomy and shared dependency. If indeed we are to consider ourselves as both embedded within and as the equal summation of our environment as seen through Ingold’s ‘Trust’ lens, then biological cyclical notions of birth, aging, death and rebirth become pertinent to material. We grieve for the death of both nature and ourselves in two interconnected spheres, intellectually in our conscious mind and sensorially in our animal autonomic nervous systems, with the unity of our mind and our nature intrinsic to the process of being alive to the world, with a view of personhood in which the self is seen to inhere in the unfolding of our relations to our environment. Ben Rawlence echoes that trust is also about hope, with “true hope not being a prayer for the maintenance of an unsustainable lifestyle founded on violence and extraction, but an abiding interest in the possibility, in the eternal exploration of the mysteries and wonders of life, human or otherwise”. This possibility can be seen in the radical biomaterial of Ferrier’s Urns, rejecting that ‘prayer for an unsustainable lifestyle’ in favour of authentic restoration beyond those promised “lone and level sands”. 

The seven urns, crafted from the invasive Himalayan Balsam (Impatiens glandulifera), encapsulate both ecological concern and artistic ingenuity. This plant, notorious for its ecological destruction along the River Wye, rapidly proliferates, outcompeting native flora and causing severe soil erosion. Traditionally eradicated through burning, Ferrier repurposes this plant, transforming its death into a new kind of material life. By combining the Balsam with biodegradable agents like Brown Algae and tree sap, Ferrier highlights an environmental issue while challenging waste disposal norms. This transformative process aligns with painter Paul Klee’s view of "form-giving as life," finding in material processes a kind of rebirth. Synthesizing ecological stewardship, the process involves transforming invasive plant matter into a durable, biodegradable material. Dried, ground Balsam mixed with recycled paper and natural adhesives forms a sculptable substance resembling wood to create seven Urn vessels then filled not with ashes, but compost, in suggestion of a sympoietic life narrative that traverses multiple dimensions of existence—individual, social, biological, and even molecular—urging an emergent autobiomediated collaboration with various forms of life. The story of clay, for example, does not begin with the potter but has a geological history that spans eons. The life of a pot extends beyond its creation, involving various interactions until it returns to the earth, potentially to be rediscovered and recontextualized in the future. Finishing, therefore, is merely a moment in the life of a pot, a rite of passage from preparation to use. A properly ecological approach begins with the concept of the whole-organism-in-its-environment, viewing 'organism plus environment' as an indivisible totality. Ferrier's Urns reflect this totality as developmental systems, emphasizing circularity in both ecological and cognitive terms. This indicates that mind or consciousness is not separate from the life process, with the Urns themselves existing at the forefront of what Alfred North Whitehead called a ‘creative advance into novelty’. The life cycle of these objects culminates in their burial, a ritualistic act that returns their decomposed forms to the earth as a gift of compost. This gesture emphasizes sharing with the land without imposing control and in the hope, but not guarantee, of reciprocation, an authentic articulation of Ingold’s ‘Trust’ paradigm. This synthesized intellectual and material approach creates a new potential for invasive plants as a material resource, aligning with restorative practices that transcend false paradoxical notions of sustainability. This shift from passive decay to active restoration embodies a metanoia that views materials as expressive agents co-constructing meaning with humans through our engagement with nascent material technologies, such as the biomaterials seen in Ferrier’s practise. This notion of a materially entangled relationship, in archaeological accounts of the early Neolthic, is viewed as the catalyst for the development of the human mind and subsequent civilization, offering an explanation of how linear exploitation of resources, and the subsequent development of exploitative technologies, resulted in the dominating relationship we recognise today. Predicated on the theory that human separation from nature occurred as we became ever more dependent on ‘things’ i.e. technologies, and less dependent on organic resources, with those technologies likewise being dependent on us and not the environment from which they emerged via human intervention, is a linear paradigm which archaeologist Ian Hodder articulates through a series of algebraic dependencies: Entanglement = (Human-Thing Dependency) + (Thing-Thing Dependency) + (Thing-Human Dependency) + (Human-Human Dependency). Ferrier’s urns challenge this dominating linear pattern of dependency, fostering instead an equal, circular and autonomous inter-dependency with material resources:(HT + HH = TH + TT). This latter equation demonstrates a unified ontology of human>nature relations via a trusting return to the organic environment from which we emanate.

Ferrier likewise uses archaeological measurement conventions in the display of the Urn vessels to highlight their connection across time to portray soil as a repository of ancestral memory and enact a certain animism that views Soil as Ancestor. This idea, echoed in Cosmo Sheldrake’s song "The Soil Keeps Secrets," positions the soil biome as an essential organism across past, present, and future. The burial ceremony underscores our own role as living future ancestors to subsequent generations. These biomorphic vessels, resembling organic creature-like forms, suggest a familial relationship, portraying the urn as a nurturing 'parent' in kin with its cohort, their soft, limb protrusions inviting a tender interaction akin to cradling offspring, symbolizing the trust and care we urgently need to embody towards our soils and their interconnected biomes. Subsequently Ferrier’s Urns enact a relinquishment of the domination and control of nature established during the first rise of agriculture during the Neolithic era. At the largely pastoral Levantine Çatalhöyük settlement, practices of skull removal of the dead, along with their burial under domestic floors to integrate the dead into daily life, indicates a certain pattern and need for control over ancestors and the metaphysical realm of death itself. In contrast, Ferrier’s urns represent a surrendering of death to the cycles of rebirth in decay, their burial an act of act of hope and reverence to the Soil Ancestor, rather than an intervening. They suggest that what comes from the earth must return to it, offering a vision of environmental harmony and respect for ancestral memory. These objects embody a dynamic trust in the environment, illustrating a reciprocal relationship with the soil and the life it sustains. Integrating principles of new materialism and ecological stewardship, Ferrier’s work transcends disciplinary boundaries, offering a multi-dimensional response to contemporary environmental challenges: what comes from the earth must go back.