Multispecies Placemaking

Multispecies Placemaking is an ongoing enquiry that invites local artists and creatives to explore how art might play a part in changing how we relate to the natural world.

Last year, artists Jessica El Mal and Zsofia Szonja Illes joined us to share from their practice and discuss the connection between socially-engaged art, ecology, decolonisation and the forming of more-than-human communities. The talk was accompanied by a reading group responding to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s seminal text Braiding Sweetgrass, which you can read here.

In the Autumn, midlands based artist Rachel Pimm led the workshop Land, Literacy, Languages at Dartmouth Park, which aimed to create an embodied space for reflection on environmental conditions and the climate crisis through words and senses.

This summer we hosted a day-long event, Subterranean Lines: a foraging walk and ceramic workshop, which responded to the nature reserve Wrens Nest in Dudley. We collaborated with Paul Floyd from Friends of Wrens Nest, and Lorraine Bates of Woodsetton Pottery to do a walk which touched upon the site’s layers of natural and social histories, and ceramics workshop using local wild clays. The event explored how the tactility of shaping clay and of rock / fossils puts us in touch with deep timescales, and therefore more environmentally conscious ways of being.