2023
Lead Artist: Wild Escape project funded by ArtFund
with Combe Martin Museum and Primary School – and Lynton Museum and Primary School.
I worked with pupils to organise demonstrations on behalf of local wildlife, to give Nature a voice and to produce a banner using the museum collections as a starting point.
A short film about the process can be viewed at Facebook
The project was inspired by a visit to Lynton by Percy Byshhe Shelley when he tried to start an English Revolution in North Devon; sending his manservant into Barnstaple to paste tracts on the walls and putting poetry into bottles so that they might wash up in Bristol. We looked at his poem “The Cloud” where the cloud speaks and thought about what other forms of Nature might say if given the chance
In the footsteps of the Romantic Poets
2023/22/21
Delivering workshops for 1.3 In the Footsteps of the Romantic Poets – QLPS, Quantock Landscape Partnership Scheme This year I worked at Alfoxden with Alice Crane with four primary and one secondary and four primary schools. William and Dorothy Wordsworth rented Alfoxden which was a mile or so away from Coleridge’s cottage in Nether Stowey. It became a hotel at some point then lay derelict for a number of years and is in the process of being restored by a Buddhist Community.
We did observational drawing and wrote poetry, used mud and grass to draw with, coloured sticks with chalk so that they looked like the water snakes in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, wrote poems for the hollow “wishing trees” and worked with an ancient oak in the grounds using tannin that was seeping from the bark and oak gall ink.
In 2022 I was working with Taunton Museum around their Coleridge show – transforming the museum into “Xanadu” – a museum whose objects record a mythical land. Pupils made up stories, drew pictures, wrote and performed mini plays, learnt some poetry and undertake different writing exercises.
In 2021 I took groups of pupils onto the Quantocks – where they drew using earth and crushed plants, carried out listening exercises, wrote using oak gall ink and twigs and sketched wildlife – from bugs to horses.
We did film work where pupils hid in the landscape and then emerged from their hiding places as creatures of the forest – and we built dams and houses in streams