Haus-A-Rest

A zine shaped by artists, for the bold, the curious, and the uncompromising.
Haus-a-rest exists for the creatives who notice what others miss, who translate lived experience into striking images and fearless words. This is a space for the daring, the different, and the deeply authentic.

Each issue brings together work that resists the obvious, fresh perspectives, quiet rebellions, and art that moves without asking permission. We’re drawn to the unseen, the unfiltered, and the moments that linger.

Our Open Calls remain free and open to all.

They’re an invitation to share what’s been forming, to test new ideas, and to connect with a community rooted in curiosity and creative risk.

Step into the zine.
Let’s carry forward the voices that refuse to fade into the background.

Issue 69

“Foraging as Arts Practice”

During Internationals womens month.

For much of human history, women’s knowledge has been rooted in the land. Long before formal systems of medicine, agriculture, or art, women learned the rhythms of plants through observation, touch, and repetition. Foraging was not simply a means of survival, but a ritual practice, a way of reading the earth, listening to seasons, and understanding the body as part of a larger ecological system.

This knowledge was carried through hands and gestures rather than texts. Plants were gathered with care, often at specific times of day or year, guided by lunar cycles, weather, and instinct. Foraging was intertwined with daily life: food, medicine, beauty, and ceremony were not separate disciplines, but part of a holistic relationship between body and environment. The act of gathering itself became a form of devotion, an acknowledgment of dependence, reciprocity, and respect.

Women have long been the keepers of this embodied intelligence. Midwives, healers, herbalists, and caretakers worked with roots, leaves, seeds, and flowers to support birth, healing, nourishment, and ritual. These practices were deeply intuitive yet highly skilled, shaped by generations of observation and shared experience. The body served as both archive and tool, learning through sensation, scent, taste, and touch.

As industrialisation and patriarchal systems reshaped societies, much of this knowledge was dismissed, feared, or deliberately erased. Women’s relationships to plants were recast as superstition rather than science, ritual rather than reason. Foraging, once a vital and communal practice, was separated from everyday life and increasingly regulated, commercialised, or forgotten. Yet the knowledge did not disappear; it went underground, carried quietly through family traditions, folk practices, and domestic rituals.

In recent years, there has been a renewed return to these ways of knowing. Contemporary artists, writers, and makers, many of them women, are re-engaging with foraging as both ecological practice and creative methodology. Walking, gathering, fermenting, dyeing, weaving, and making medicines are reclaimed not only as sustainable acts, but as forms of resistance against extractive systems and accelerated modes of production.

Foraging today becomes a way to slow down and attune, to notice what grows where, what is abundant, what must be left untouched. It asks for consent, patience, and care. These gestures echo ancient rituals while speaking directly to present concerns around environmental collapse, bodily autonomy, and cultural repair.

In art practice, foraging allows materials to carry memory, place, and lineage. A leaf, root, fibre, or seed is not neutral, it holds stories of labour, climate, land use, and gendered histories of care. By working with these materials, artists reconnect making to the cycles of growth and decay, situating creativity within the living world rather than outside of it.

To forage is to remember, It is an act of listening to the earth and to the body, re-establishing relationships that were never truly lost, only quieted. In reclaiming these rituals, women continue a lineage of care, creativity, and ecological knowledge that insists on interdependence, reverence, and the possibility of healing through connection.

We always welcome submissions in all media, including but not limited to visual art, photography,  sculpture, printmaking,  painting, collage, textile art, ceramics, video, sound, performance documentation, text-based work, and experimental practices.

The focus of this open call was not just on finished outcomes, but on the relationships, methods and questions that emerge when artistic practice and the natural world intersect. We are interested in work that reflects ecological thinking, material awareness, and creative responses to foraging, land, and nature as active collaborators in making.

We invite you to take your time, and think about the natural world around you that supports your every step, fills your lungs with oxygen and your eyes with beauty.

THIS MONTH

HAVE A SPECIAL FEATURE BY

OUR EDITOR & ARTIST

NICHOLA RODGERS,

SHE TALKS ABOUT HER

PRACTICE AS A

FORAGER & ARTIST

AND HOW THESE TWO ARE

INTRINSIC TO HER PRACTICE

🌳🌿🍁🍄🌳🌿🍁🍄🌳🌿🍁

As always, HAUS-A-REST remains a platform for experimental, independent, and boundary-pushing work.
This issue is a testament to the creative energy of artists who transform overwhelm into form, repetition into rhythm, and chaos into meaning.

Enter the issue. Explore the layers.

FOR THE GALLERY AND HERE FOR THE WRITER’S CORNER, AND BLOG News

This month we have a new resident artist Anna Li with her first piece of work - from our Micro resident artists here

Micro-Residency

Our Micro Residencies

We’re excited to continue these Micro-Residency, a small but intentional space for artists, writers, and creative thinkers who want to deepen their practice, expand their ideas, and receive thoughtful guidance along the way.

This is a new space is for reflection, experimentation, and artistic guidance, if this is something you are interested in then please do get in touch via curator space link on our opportunities page.

The residency isn’t tied to a specific location, it’s a flexible, supportive environment shaped around each participant’s needs. Whether you are at the beginning of a project, stuck in the middle, or simply seeking a clearer sense of direction, the micro-residency can provide:

• Creative Advice,

• Insight into process, artistic development, and sustaining momentum

• Provocations and exercises to challenge habits, expand methods, and spark new thinking

• Critique sessions that value generosity over hierarchy

• Dialogue and reflection, because sometimes a conversation can unlock more than a month of solitude

• Exposure through the zine and social channels, for our residents who wish to share work in progress

The HAUS-A-REST Micro-Residency is built on the belief that artists don’t always need grand studios, vast budgets, or months away from the world, they often need attention, exchange, and a context in which their ideas can breathe.

In a time of constant accumulation, of information, pressure, expectation, this residency offers a moment to sift, sharpen, and reimagine. It’s a place to sort through your creative overflow, to cultivate clarity, or to find excitement in the mess.

you can apply on our opportunities page.
Stay tuned, stay curious, and keep making.

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*News is now on the blog*

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This month we have

Kevin Caplin

our featured creative & founder of Caplintec

This issue’s resident creatives include our critical art writer Michaela Hall, our wordsmith poet Peter Devonald, and our editors and creators Nichola and Jenna

!! Calling Artists & Writers!!

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We invite artists, collectives, and interdisciplinary practitioners to submit work for The Fragmented Body, an upcoming ONLINE exhibition exploring the body as rupture, archive, surface, and site of transformation.

Concept

The body has never been singular. It is divided by memory, shaped by technology, marked by labour, gendered by language, racialised by history, politicised by borders, and dispersed across digital and physical realities. It is whole and broken at once.

The Fragmented Body seeks works that examine:

• The body as archive — scars, memories, inherited histories

• Dislocation, exile, and displacement

• Medical, mechanical, or digital intervention

• Prosthetics, avatars, extensions, and simulations

• Surveillance and the commodified body

• Psychological fragmentation and multiplicity

• The body in pieces: symbolic, literal, metaphorical

• We welcome interpretations that are poetic, political, intimate, speculative, or confrontational.

Eligible Media

All media are welcome, including but not limited to:

• Painting, drawing, printmaking

• Sculpture and installation

• Photography

• Video and film - Vimeo and Youtube only

• Performance and live art

• Sound art

• Text-based or interdisciplinary practices

• Both existing works and new proposals are eligible.

Eligibility

This open call is open to artists at all stages of their practice. Emerging and underrepresented voices are especially encouraged to apply.

Submission Guidelines for ARTISTS

You must provide:

• A brief description of the proposed or existing work (max. 300 words). The description should explain how the work connects to the theme and explain the context. This is one of the key ways we select your work.

• A clear, well-photographed image of your work.  Please ensure that your work is resolved.

• Your Instagram tag is a MUST.  We will not select artists who do not have an Instagram tag.

We welcome the strange, the intimate, the bold, and the quietly profound.

For Writers:

• Genres: Short stories, essays, poetry, experimental writing, and cross-genre works

• Length: Up to 1,000 words for prose; up to 3 poems

• Format: Word document only

• Synopsis: A brief summary of the piece (50 words) explaining how it connects to the theme.

Our Open Call details are here

or via the link here at Curatorspace