SustainLab RCA presents Following Fallowing, society’s annual and Royal College of Art’s biggest exhibition showcasing environmentally-conscious works, including Schools of Arts & Humanities, Design, and Communications.

In a contemporary era defined by productivity, speed, and measurable outcomes, stopping is often perceived as a sign of stagnation. Yet the agricultural practice of fallowing, the intentional resting of land to restore its vitality, maintain ecological balance, and prepare for future cultivation, offers another perspective.

Following Fallowing draws on this principle to reconsider the relationship between rest, creativity, and sustainability. Rather than framing rest as withdrawal or inactivity, the exhibition positions it as a fundamental condition for making, a generative interval through which ideas mature, systems recalibrate, and practices renew themselves. In doing so, it asks: What might creative resilience look like if we valued cycles of pause as much as cycles of production?

Bringing together artists, designers, and creative practitioners from the Royal College of Art, the exhibition engages fallowing across diverse media, including painting, photography, sculpture, interactive installation, and video. Through material choices, temporal processes, and spatial interventions, the participants explore cycles of depletion and regeneration, labour and latency, presence and withdrawal. Rest is approached not as a temporary interruption but as a methodology, one embedded within ecological, intellectual, and artistic systems.