Outdoor Art for HP16

I recently ran a creative consultation project as part of a project called Destination HP16, which is using the arts to help regenerate the villages at the heart of the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Other partners in the project include Artworks for Business, Creative Bucks, the Roald Dahl Museum, One Church Street Gallery, Misbourne Abbey, Chiltern District Council and Bucks County Council.

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My role was to produce a short artist's residency to generate ideas for public art in outdoor locations near Great Missenden, and to offer these ideas for public comment. I recruited the artist Pippa North and the mixed-age Eco Club of Great Missenden Primary School.

Pippa and I introduced the group to the concept of public art, and we discussed the ways in which art and the natural environment can relate to each other. I gave my slide show of pictures from the Lascaux cave paintings to Mark Wallinger's proposed Horse, and Pippa brought in an amazing range of sustainable and recycled art materials for the children to choose from.

Having taken a tour of some possible sites for public art within walking distance of the school and made an ephemeral nest-like piece for the village green, the children began to discuss and refine some ideas for more permanent art.

The children mostly proposed large structures that they would be able to climb around and occupy. They wanted to make art from environmentally-friendly materials that they could interact with and use as personal play spaces, and that could also provide habitats for wildlife.

The den concept seems to have a timeless appeal that is possibly even stronger in these times of adult supervision and indoor play: a recent survey by Natural England concluded that ony 10% of children in the UK play regularly in green spaces, compared to the 40% of adults who did so in their own childhoods. 81% of children and 85% of parents agree that they would like to see more unsupervised outdoor play, and yet it is a struggle to reverse this very recent cultural shift.

Of course, this issue is at the heart of what I'm trying to achieve with Outdoor Culture: a re-wilding of humanity that I believe to be crucial to the health of our children, our environment and our society. As Simon Barnes wrote in the Times earlier this year, 'Without non-human life we are less than human'. Our need for wildness in our tamed lives is as 'colossal, sinuous, sensuous' as the tiger who came to tea in Judith Kerr's story.

Back in Great Missenden, the children of the Eco Club made fantastic models of their ideas for outdoor public art (the tiger never made it past the first sketch), which we mounted as an exhibition at One Church Street Gallery. Pippa and I then spent a Saturday in the gallery showing people around the work and seeking their views on the concept of outdoor art in local woods and fields:

'Fascinating show - such imagination! The children's ideas are wonderful.'

'Lovely pieces, really stimulating. Would love to see them realised full size.'

'We really liked the Head and the Pirate Ship. Great work'

'The giant's head is a beautiful idea. I can imagine a big giant wandering around the Chiltern Hills ... his head sticking out over the tree line.'

The artist Pippa North found the project very fulfilling emotionally and professionally, and was particularly impressed with the children's focus and skills. The teachers found that the project has helped them re-think their approach to teaching art, and plan to create more time and space for processes that are child-led and less directed by adults.

Outdoor Culture continues to campaign with Destination HP16 for the development of a local outdoor gallery where artists, learners and audiences can connect with wildness through experience as well as imagination.

Many thanks to Pippa North, Nicola Keating, Lyndsey and Dennis Keeling, John Scrimshire and Malcolm Godwin.

Beech Life

Over the last month, works of art have emerged from green oak, forest sounds and the imagination of Nick Garnett, Gina Martin, Dan Cordell and Duncan McAfee, to form the new Sensory Trail at Burnham Beeches.

I first came to Burnham Beeches as a child and I've never forgotten it. Now it's the site of Outdoor Culture's biggest project to date, completed on 27 March 2009 just before my company's first birthday: six permanent sculptures, one temporary installation, one poem, six episodes of audio guide, made by four artists and sixty children.

The artists were asked to make work that reflects the spirit of this ancient woodland; to create tactile interest; to sculpt on a human scale; to bring a focus to specific sites without competing with their existing beauty.

There are lots more images on my website at http://www.outdoorculture.com/.

To find Burnham Beeches, go to http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/burnham . From there you can also download Duncan McAfee's sonic art and the audio guide he made with the Year 6 pupils of Farnham Common Junior School.

Enjoy!

White Rabbit

The problem with making art for the natural landscape, says the artist Nick Garnett, is the degree of beauty that's already there.


These photos were taken within an hour's walk of my house in the Chilterns AONB on Sunday 1 March 2009. I think they underline Nick's point!

These lines on the stump of a felled tree tell a story I can't quite read.

The art of geology - chalky brush strokes.

Just a few gorse flowers out so far. I'm looking forward to that sweet smell they pour out.

Bluebells pushing through the leaf litter. In a few weeks this forest floor will be luminous with colour.


Of course art and nature reflect one another. To talk of human artifice as something separate from natural ingenuity, to see the man-made as unnatural, masks the truth that we are every bit as wild as the bluebells. That's why they move us.

Valley of Dreams

I had a meeting in the Lake District on Monday, and I couldn't really not give myself a day's play in the mountains afterwards.

From the top of the Kirkstone Pass, I climbed up Wounscale as the views of Red Screes expanded behind me. The Kirkstone Pass Inn was soon a dot in the distance far below.




The diversity of scale you get in the mountains is always profound. Just as I was admiring the summits along the skyline I caught sight of this newt. Perhaps it was too cold to run away.




High in the sky on top of Stony Cove Pike.

I cut down into Threshthwaite Cove, and enjoyed wandering the valley floor checking out wild camping spots for the future. The whole valley was an unexpected pleasure, full of sweeping curves, craggy drama and rushing streams.

Nice.

Walkers Bikers Paddlers

Snowdonia was fun.

I got to the forest of Coed Y Brenin on Friday evening, and impressed myself by locating the dark bothy in the dark woods a mile or so from the road. A bothy, if you didn't know, is a basic uninhabited house, usually in a remote area, maintained for overnight use by anyone who can find it. If you join the Mountain Bothies Association, you get the grid references for loads of them, mostly in Scotland but with a few in Wales and Northern England.


The bothy at Penrhos Isaf was empty on my arrival, and I had the place to myself on Friday night. With candles lit around the house and a fire going in the stove, I felt at home pretty swiftly. After dinner and a beer, I retired to my sleeping bag and roll matt on the wooden floor upstairs. The people who joined me the next night were surprised that I'd had the nerve to spend the night there alone - but then at that point I hadn't heard of the ghost ...

In the morning I had a bit of an explore around the forest, which I think I also had to myself, and drove South to the foot of Cadair Idris, the Giant's Armchair. I'd wanted to climb this mountain for ages and the weather was fine if a little windy.


The Minffordd Path winds its way around into Cwm Cau, before climbing the ridge that leads up above Llyn Cau. I never actually made it to Pen y Gadair, the very top of Cadair Idris, but turned back at the top of Craig Cwm Amarch (summit pictured) in what had become a ferocious gale. Still, I had a good look around and I'll definitely be back.

I headed back to the bothy to find two vets, a steel-worker and a website designer esconced by the fire. A lot of the conversation, naturally, revolved around outdoor activities. My house-mates for the night were into mountain biking and kayaking: apparently both are about tapping into elemental forces to carve your route - like drawing with gravity. When two more guests arrived later that night, they opened a conversation with the question 'Walkers? Bikers? Paddlers?' Perhaps there are only three kinds of people.


I took advice from one of the guys who professed to be all of the above and headed out to the Rhinogs on Sunday under blue skies and cold air. Rhinog Fawr from the East looked much more impressive in reality than it did on the map, and I enjoyed the wild feel of the place on the walk-in through forest and then up what started out as pathless, boggy mountainside. I eventually found an unmapped track that sped up my progress to the summit, where I got pelted by sideways hail and more ridiculous winds.


I only saw two other people on the mountain all day. I spotted some wild mountain goats out on the hillside - apparently they're descended form domestic animals but now totally feral. I thought this moss was every bit as wild, and easier to photograph.

Small Wonder

January's shaped up into a busy month for me, and the longer I spend at my computer, the easier it is to forget that one of the reasons I started Outdoor Culture was to spend more time outdoors myself. Most months I get away to the mountains, and this weekend I'm off to Snowdonia to have a look at Cadair Idris and stay at the bothy at Penrhos Isaf. It'll be my first time in a bothy, so no doubt I'll have something to say about it on this blog in due course.

I haven't been away since January, but the Chiltern Hills have been really doing their stuff recently, and I've made a point of getting out for walks with and without my children.

I'm a fan of artist James Aldridge's blog, with its reminders of the small wonders all around us, and thought I'd post up a few photos and thoughts inspired by James' way of thinking and the beautiful countryside just beyond my front door.

I took these photos on 11 January, after a brief flurry of snow had melted, and a freezing fog laid amazing ice crystals all over the Chilterns.

I went out for about four hours, covering a fair distance from Great Missenden through Little Hampden and across the valley to Great Hampden and home again through the woods in the dark. The fog and the frost made everything unreal; unfamiliar. The absence of grand views made it easier to read the small print in the landscape.

I pushed the ice off these buds with gloved fingertips. Spring is at the heart of winter.

Avian signposts - pointing away from the direction of travel. Look where I've been: this is where I come from.

Deck the Halls

My poor children. Life must be very confusing for them.


They come home from their nativity rehearsals thinking they’ve got Christmas straight in their heads, and then I start banging on about Yule logs, festivals of light and the earth’s orbit.


Our modern culture of Christmas is a mix and match affair that brings together a number of belief systems. The Christian story of a new hope for humanity chimes perfectly with the ethos of the mid-winter festival that it replaced in early Christian Rome: Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, "the birthday of the unconquered sun.", was celebrated in Rome on 25 December, after the night of the winter solstice, to mark the beginning of the lengthening of the days. The candles, gift-giving and merriment had already been appropriated from the Saturnalia festival that originally concluded on 23 December.



Many aspects of Christmas come from Northern Europe, where late convertors to Christianity were encouraged to recast their cultural traditions in a new spiritual light. Yule is thought to derive from the Old Norse word for wheel, again marking the turn of the winter and the inevitable rebirth of the sun. The Finnish Joulupukki is a character who dresses in warm red clothing and goes from house to house bringing gifts for well-behaved children – sound familiar?


Christmas for me is a celebration of light in the darkest time of the year, a chance to express goodwill to others through the giving and receiving of gifts and a space to reflect and commune with my family. But my favourite bit of symbolism is our bringing of the outdoors indoors, with fruit-bearing holly and mistletoe and of course, a decorated and illuminated evergreen tree, to mark the miracle of life and and our place within it.



Winter festivals were always big news for agricultural societies, coming at a time when there was less work to do and long dark nights to fill with drinking and dancing. If there’s anything I regret about the evolution of Christmas, it’s the way we’ve replaced dancing with slobbing out in front of the TV.


Still, there’s always New Year’s Eve ...