Artist Julien Masson shares a recent community collaboration with artists, residents and businesses, which uses recycled garden furniture, instruments and miscellaneous timber found locally to create public art that reflects a mix of cultures and transform public spaces.
900 words: estimated reading time = 3.5 minutes
This series of bespoke artworks — a site-specific mural community collaboration, created in partnership with a cafe, a group of artists and local residents — creates a prominent terrace space in Southampton’s city centre. Our design and construction process is rooted in sustainability and inclusivity.
I worked on this as part of a core team, including fellow artist David McDiarmid, and in partnership with Mettricks café, to transform what was a blank canvas. Our aim was to turn a highly visible but rather bland area into a dynamic and creative focal point.
‘Music in the city’: recycled furniture and piano parts with paint, Mettricks cafe, Southampton’s cultural quarter
The murals feature a bold, contemporary design using vibrant cut-out letters and abstract shapes. These aren’t new materials; they are recycled pieces of timber found locally and donated by residents.
We consciously take materials that might have been tossed aside — from broken garden furniture and instruments to miscellaneous timber — and turn them into something special. This encourages everyone to think creatively about waste and promotes recycling.
A collaborative community process
Working on these collaborative projects often starts with initiating a conversation with local businesses and, often facilitated by their staff, we typically send out a call for material donations.
The community’s response is usually incredibly generous: local people donate wood and domestic items that would otherwise be destined for the skip or the bonfire. Our goal is always to keep these materials as local as possible, like a neighbourhood contemporary survey.
Community collaboration – artists in action
The donations we receive are very varied: chairs, an old table, piano keys, shelves, a chimney surround, clocks, barometers, garden fences, and coat hangers, just to name a few. These pieces are not just raw material, they fundamentally dictate the form and character of the final artwork. I see it as a positive challenge to weave as many of these disparate elements into a cohesive whole.
We generally favour solid timber and plywood for durability, and what is interesting is that each donated item brings its own story to the final work. This presents a unique challenge, especially when trying to preserve wood that may have been exposed to the elements or damaged before being painted or varnished. Navigating these imperfections, however, adds a rich layer of authenticity, ensuring the work is genuinely true to the place where it is created.
Essentially, nothing goes to waste. Even the smallest off-cuts are saved and will find their way into future artworks.
Beyond the materials, the community shapes the ideas. I also run public consultation sessions where local residents and business staff offer input and suggestions. While it’s rarely possible to include every idea, I genuinely love the notion of people discovering their own small suggestions or personal memories hidden inside the finished piece, like a secret message hidden in the work.
The collaborative process is, of course, a mixed bag of challenges, with the back-and-forth dialogue of working with others being as challenging as it is rewarding. That said, I believe this partnership approach forces everyone involved to maintain a generous and open-minded stance, encouraging a less controlled, more spontaneous way of working. It’s a wonderful way to keep the individual ego in check and the creativity flowing.
Community spirit & public art
‘Bigging up Southampton’: upcycled timber and paint, Southampton’s Guildhall Square.
The bright colour palette is a direct reflection of the rich mix of cultures in the neighbourhood, while the design subtly integrates local heritage elements. Making the artwork accessible is important to us. Each piece is modular and tactile, incorporating varied textures and depth. This ensures the piece is readable by touch, a feature supported by a team member who organises touch tours for the partially sighted.
The artwork turns an otherwise bland space into an eye-catching feature that offers interest both at a distance and up close.
‘Land Ahoy’, upcycled timber, furniture and paint. Southampton Forward commission in collaboration with the Community of RedBridge and the Ship Inn.
Like our previous public pieces, this mural is modular and easy to repair, ensuring its longevity. We hope to continue this organic growth by adding more layers in the coming months, allowing the artwork to develop its own unique identity. Our team, primarily composed of dedicated members from The Keepers Artists Collective, alongside supportive local businesses, proves that with a little investment and community spirit, ambitious public art is entirely achievable.
We look forward to bringing similar work — giving locals something they can truly be proud of — to more neighbourhoods across the city.
Find more
The Keepers Artist Collective is a non-profit group of artists based in the city of Southampton, Hampshire, including Julien Masson and David McDiarmid. The 8 artists come from different backgrounds and disciplines, and share an interest in creating art, community-based art projects, and supporting other artist networks.
Julien’s previous posts for ClimateCultures include The Call of the Forest, which describes a residency in the New Forest, an environment that juxtaposes natural and human worlds, and Julien’s choice there of a physical paint medium to represent the digital realm that often distances us from the natural.
Mary Waltham introduces her and fellow artist Jackie Amies’ joint exhibition on their local ancient woodland. Their art invites our curiosity about these rare, ecologically rich areas, which have been largely untouched by human activity since before 1600.
2,150 words: estimated reading time = 8.5 minutes
I can never remember a time in my life when I did not prefer to be outside rather than inside. Growing up on a farm, in a small village in Dorset, the open spaces outdoors in all seasons were my habitat — woods, fields, streams, and ponds. In the past there was much greater human involvement and familiarity with the natural world and I have been fortunate to experience that when young and now, in later life. It enlarges my sense of the world and gives me simple joy. Living now in Selborne, Hampshire and spending large chunks of time walking means that inevitably I am drawn to ancient woodland. Our cottage is 200 yards as the crow flies from Selborne Hanger, an iconic East Hampshire ancient woodland.
Context: Where is Selborne Hanger?Excerpts from Selborne Local Landscape Character Assessment (2014) are included here to clarify the position of the site.“Selborne Hanger lies above the village of Selborne in Hampshire. At its apex the Hanger is one of the highest points in Hampshire, 211 metres (692 ft) above sea level. In the image, contour lines are at 10m intervals. The summit and steep escarpment are covered by woods, dropping abruptly to the fields above Selborne."The name Hanger comes from the Old English word Hang’r, meaning a steeply wooded slope."From any direction, it is Selborne Hanger that commands first attention; the village being hidden from view, nestling some 85 metres below the ridge of the Chalk Scarp."The village and its Hanger are synonymous. When inside the village, the Hanger always feels present.”1
Gilbert White described this place in 1789:
“The soils of this district are almost as various and diversified as the views and aspects. The high part to the south-west consists of a vast hill of chalk, rising three hundred feet above the village; and is divided into a sheep down, the high wood, and a long hanging wood called the Hanger. The covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs. The down, or sheep-walk, is a pleasing park-like spot, of about one mile by half that space, jutting out on the verge of the hill-country, where it begins to break down into the plains, and commanding a very engaging view, being an assemblage of hill, dale, wood-lands, heath, and water.”
— Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (1789)2
In hindsight, I was slow to engage fully and in depth with the significance of ancient woodland that Selborne Hanger and several surrounding areas exuberantly typify. So often when working in London at a demanding role as an executive in fast-paced magazine publishing, I would walk into the Hanger for a break from analysis. Yet always there was this sense of place, including curiosity about all the species that had gone before me. Who were they, what were they doing in the wood and on the Common, and would they recognise it now? I believe so.
“The experience of place and the significance of a sense of place, has never seemed to me simply a matter of sentiment or feeling, but to be something much deeper and more profound.”
— Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2017)3
In recent years as my art practice developed, I met Jackie Amies, another local artist and keen walker who came to an Open Studio I hosted. In the summer of 2024 we began a conversation about making work for a joint exhibition, and we started to cast around for themes that we could both respond to with enthusiasm.
The result was our exhibition Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place at the Allen Gallery in Alton, Hampshire. While each of our art practices continues to develop in appreciation of and response to a variety of habitats close at hand in Hampshire, downlands, wetlands, rivers and chalk streams, for example, why did we choose ancient woodland for this, our first exhibition together?
Despite best efforts to support and encourage these woodlands to thrive, they are consistently under pressure for development and, of course, from continuing assaults by a range of rapidly evolving tree diseases — such as ash dieback — that are further enabled by a warmer climate year-round. We set out to explore and raise awareness of the many dimensions of beauty of ancient woodland from our own perspectives.
Natural England has an inventory of all 52,000 ancient woodland sites across the UK as an online map.4 Looking at the whole map it is clear that many, even most, of the sites are small, fragmented pockets.
And yet, according to the Woodland Trust, “Ancient woods are our richest and most complex terrestrial habitat in the UK and they are home to more threatened species than any other. Centuries of undisturbed soils and accumulated decaying wood have created the perfect place for communities of fungi and invertebrates and specialist species of insects, birds and mammals.”5
What is ‘ancient woodland’? It is distinctive and often small tracts of woodland that have been largely untouched by humans since before 1600, and now cover just 2.5% of the UK.
Ancient woods are therefore also a continuing record of centuries of interaction and interdependence between man and woodland, often containing remnants of archaeological features such as wood banks, pits and charcoal kilns.
Ancient woodland is an immensely rich and complex area for exploration scientifically, culturally and artistically. Both Jackie and I feel as though we have only just begun!
Our exhibition invites visitors to the Allen Gallery to be curious about these rare and special areas we are fortunate enough to have access to.
We have used traditional media of paint, fine-art printmaking and photography, but with a twist. Paintings made with soil, and new ways to discover trees are among the interpretations. A gentle woodland soundscape accompanies visitors; we wanted people to have an immersive experience once in the gallery.
A sense of place in art
Jackie is exhibiting fine art prints that focus on trees. How many of us can identify trees from their leaves or bark? A series of twelve monoprints of ancient woodland tree leaves entitled ‘Foliate’ refreshes that lost skill.
As does ‘Barking’, a series of tree bark etchings over a coloured lino print. The printed backgrounds are an interpretation of the colours found either in the bark, within the wood or the changing leaf colours.
The mystery of ancient woodland is evoked by the series ‘Rooted’, twelve unique monotypes inspired by a year of walking at Ashford Hanger. Each piece draws the viewer into the steep chalk slopes of the East Hampshire Hangers to gnarled wood, undercut roots and animal paths heading off between majestic mature tree trunks; a world rich in an abundance of life.
Painting is my primary medium for this exhibition. I have been working with soil as a paint for the six pieces in the series ‘Ground’, using earth and ash as pigment. The pieces reveal and elevate the aesthetic qualities of ancient woodland soil through their intense colours and textures. As alternative portraits of place, the six Selborne Hanger soil paintings allow the site to speak for itself. They directly reflect the history, the climate and the variety of soils that cover the Hanger.
‘Ground 1’, Mary Waltham: Soils of local Ancient Woodland, 2025.
“... the soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit.” (Berry, 1977)6“Soil, like fossil fuels took eons to develop and it too cannot be replaced…By giving soil its own agency it is elevated to an aesthetic form.” (Waltham, 2022a)7
‘Ground 2’, Mary Waltham: Soils of local Ancient Woodland, 2025.
Soil affects everything that grows in and on it and these woodlands are home to communities of plants that thrive here where the earth is undisturbed and rich in decaying matter. Varied ground flora is a striking feature of ancient woodlands, distinguishing them from recently established woods and plantations. Many of the so-called indicator species of plants in ancient woodland flower in Spring before deciduous trees are leafed out. I am showing eight paintings of such spring flowers using watercolour layers for the series ‘Flos sylva’.
My series of small watercolour paintings mounted on cradled birch panel reflects abstract fleeting views experienced while walking the Hangers Way, a long-distance route that runs south from Alton to join the South Downs Way.8 This footpath is a good way to encounter ancient woodland, to absorb a sense of the many who have passed here before us, the sound of many species, and if you are fortunate the melody of place. Witnesses all.
To help orientate visitors, in the gallery we have a large-scale map of the patches of local ancient woodland we each have frequently visited and worked from, notably Selborne (top of map) and Ashford Hanger bottom).
Patches of local ancient woodland in East Hampshire, from Natural England’s online map of Ancient Woodland.
Just outside the gallery, in the small garden, is an installation of a piece of mossy rotting wood with leaf litter. A reference to Neukom Vivarium (2006) from Mark Dion, who says of his work: “So, this isn’t really about the tree, even though the tree is the superstar. It’s really about what’s happening to the tree, about the process of decay…. the wonder of the vast complexity and diversity within a natural system”.9
The log is positioned at just the right height for a 7-year-old to look closely and spot all the life teeming on the log through the richness of decay.
A small café at Allen Gallery is the setting for ‘A Celebration of Place’, a series of forty vibrant photographs taken on-site by the artists. These are exquisite reminders of place and a further invitation to find and visit ancient woodland, and to really look.
Our work on ancient woodland is anchored and guided by generous expert advice from two lifelong landscape professionals who have worked extensively in stewardship and management roles in these woodlands. Chris Webb and David Ball have been in on this exploration of place by me and Jackie from the beginning, providing both of us with essential knowledge, their experience, and facts that have enabled us to feel confident about the truths we present. Any errors of interpretation are entirely our own.
We hope that one outcome from our show is increased understanding of the importance of rare and special ancient woodland.
Responses from visitors have been positive and encouraging – always a plus:
“What an inspiring celebration of place. I have learnt to look at a familiar landscape in an entirely new way”
“A beautiful exhibition to stumble upon. A highlight of my trip to this gorgeous county”
“We loved the birch panel artwork and the moody monoprints. We also enjoyed hearing the birdsong in the gallery as we enjoyed the art. Thank you.”
“Love the birdsong! Inspiring works – love the way the soils are ageing, and the ‘Hangers Way’ watercolour works are enchanting. Thank you.”
An artist whose work reflects a powerful interest in and curiosity about expressing the fragility of our environment through the eyes of both scientist and artist ...
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature, ‘Wild’ Deep Mappings.
1,330 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes
You can also read Iain’s new essay for Longer, ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder). Longer is our feature sharing members’ works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is usually possible with our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces or complements it here with an original, related post.
***
Where we live in the world is never one place…
– Naomi Shihab Nye, My Grandmother in the Stars
Until quite recently I always referred to Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as the best fictional narrative flowing from the same mentalité as the deep mappings that most interest me. That changed when I came across Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, an unusual combination of poetry, photographs and a conversation. I see the two books as trans-Atlantic cousins, surprisingly alike in some respects and quite unlike in others. Both celebrate a particular place in depth, and both were largely created by women whose work presupposes a poetic imagination. ‘Largely’, because both books are the product of active collaborations.
The title page of my beautiful 1986 copy of Always Coming Home — withdrawn from Shetland Library and bought second-hand — names Le Guin as author (she also drew the maps), but adds artist Margaret Chodos, composer Todd Barton and geomancer George Hersh as contributors. I get the impression that the poems in A Poet’s Dublin were selected by the editors, possibly with Boland’s assistance. It was certainly the editors who sent Boland out with a camera to gather images to accompany the chosen poems. The connections between the poems and the resulting photographs are not always obvious. They may even appear “like disjunctions”, as Randolph puts it in her Introduction, adding that this serves to remind us of something important: “that an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined”.
Much the same could be said of the disparate, even disjunctive, elements in Le Guin’s book about “the Valley”. An imagined future region certainly, but one in no small part grounded in the various adult realities that surrounded Le Guin as a child. The reality of her mother’s work as author, anthropologist, and friend to and biographer of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people of North California. Also, of her father’s work as a highly respected cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, who later in life also served as a lay psychologist. Her father’s belief that genius arises out of culture at particular times, rather than being the isolated quality of a ‘great man’, would seem to have informed Le Guin’s detailed and diverse accounts of different aspects of ‘Valley’ culture and ritual, and to have informed the contrast between that culture, aligned to nature along the lines of the First Nations peoples in California, and that of the military and technologically-preoccupied Condor people.
‘Stammersong’, a poem by Ursula Le Guin from ‘Always Coming Home’ (1985), with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine.
Narrative deep mappings: always more than one place at a time
Any literalist familiar with both books could instantly come up with reasons why my linking them is at best idiosyncratic. But then literalists believe that we live in the world one place at a time and are almost certainly immune to the pleasures and challenges of deep mappings. They’re also likely to be suspicious of an orientation described as “towards an archaeology of the future”, as Le Guin names the act of imagination that initiates Always Coming Home. While literalists might acknowledge some similarities between the polyvocal approach of Always Coming Home and certain deep mappings, I doubt they’d see an equivalent polyvocality in A Poet’s Dublin. A view that, to me, would suggest that they had either skipped or missed the point of Two Poets and a City: a Conversation,its final section.
Reading that conversation between Meehan and Boland turned me back to all that had gone before, alerting me both to the many generational and class tensions that haunt Dublin, and to the implications of their mutual sympathies as Irishwomen and poets. The relevance of all this to deep mappings is suggested by Paula Meehan’s observation that: “To all intents and purposes, our maps [of Dublin] shouldn’t overlap. What I love about poetry is that it makes sectarian or sectional stances redundant”. She adds that what she had initially mistaken as Boland’s use of the city as “a scenic backdrop for the working out of the drama of the self” was in fact an exploration of Boland’s relationship: “with the polis, with the power structures of the state as manifest in architecture, in statuary, in the suffering histories of the excluded as much as in the commemorated and sanctified official histories”. So, not polyvocal in the sense of the multiple intersecting narratives, images and scores of Always Coming Home, but a listening, conversational concern for the numerous worlds that make up Dublin at the intersection of the physical city with various popular and official imaginaries. A Dublin in which it is necessary to acknowledge that:
Small things Make the past. Make the present seem out of place.
– Eavan Boland, Once in Dublin.
Alongside the need to
… look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.
– Eavan Boland, Unheroic.
To miss the underlying tenor of that concern would be to miss all that makes Anna Liffey, here quite properly located between photographs of two Dublin bridges and perhaps the most moving and compelling of all Boland’s poems.
When I earned a living working as an artist/educator/researcher in a university, reading art criticism and theory was a necessity that stretched my thinking. Since retiring I’ve had less and less appetite for writing predicated on the presuppositions of the analytical mind. Like an animal sick from a diet lacking certain vital minerals, I’ve hunted out material to enable me to address that long-standing lack. Material that nurtures a more inclusive, holistic and relational understanding of the world. Poetry, Le Guin’s speculative fiction and her essays in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Space Crone, along with various poets’ reflective work —Boland’s A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Meehan’s wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Themhave provided rich and varied nourishment that reaches parts that criticism and theory cannot.
Why share this?
Because, like deep mapping, these two works (and others that flow from the same mentalité) help us to resist the toxic culture of possessive individualism and the culture industry that serves it.
Find more
Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin (1985) is published by Gollancz (2016 edition).
Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin (2014, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph) is published by Carcanet.
Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature explores ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder) as an approach that offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.
An independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place seen through the lens of Felix Guattari's ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications.
Poet and artist-book maker Sarah Hymas looks ahead to the Imaginarium ‘Worlds in Progress’ retreat she is running for a second year, an open, fluid, multi-layered spacetime for writers to sow and care for the seeds of imagination.
1,225 words: estimate reading time = 5 minutes
For fourteen years I ran a residential writing course, Write Like Nobody’s Watching, in South West France. After the pandemic, my enjoyment of it had changed. Even though I had, for the previous few years, been travelling down and back by train — a two day journey from Lancashire I loved — I found being part of a process that invited people to fly (no one else came overland) for five days of writing that had very little to do with the region where often people didn’t even leave the villa increasingly problematic.
The heat in the last couple of years compounded my unease. Some years it was too hot even at 10.00 am to cross the patio to reach our outdoor workshop. We had to set up under trees and I remember even having some of the one-to-ones in the swimming pool, it was hot. I needed more and more time to retreat from the retreat everyone else was taking. So I found someone else to run the week and stepped back.
Worlds in progress: creative building & building creativity
I didn’t want to stop facilitating the space for people (and often myself) to write and dream. I loved the process of building that spacetime. I just wanted to do it closer to home, in a place that was more accessible, less expensive. I wanted the place we were in to have more of an impact on those of us visiting it. I wanted more community, less alcohol (yes, my 40-year-old self, I’m looking at you), more stillness. So when I was on a residency with Settle Stories in January 2024 in an old mansion in Giggleswick, working on their Storyful Way, I knew I’d found the place I wanted to trial a new Imaginarium retreat. One that would be more collaborative in its approach, inviting a creative investment from those coming to help build the space more explicitly than simply participating in a week of writing workshops.
I also knew I didn’t want to run it solo. Increasingly, I want to work with others, to share the stresses and joys of any project. Someone to plan with. Someone to talk candidly to. I had already run an Ancestral Imaginarium with Katherine Zeserson and knew she had experience of running residential retreats so she was the obvious choice. As well as experienced, Katherine is joyful, intuitive, creatively curious and energetic. We came up with the name — Worlds in Progress — to capture our ambition for the week to be an open fluid space of multi-layered worlds: the worlds of our transient community; the worlds we were all writing; and the worlds we would return to after sharing the week — the worlds that were often so tricky for so many of us — the worlds we’d like to nudge into different directions.
Our first Worlds in Progress Retreat ran in January 2025 with ten other people who work, create and play with text somehow. We offered sitting, singing and flexing every morning, for those who wanted. We suggested loose mealtimes to suit however everyone liked to eat — sorting ourselves out for breakfast and lunch — and to fit around whatever was the occupation for people’s days. We invited people to share their creative practice during playshops later in some of the afternoons. These were attended by maybe two thirds of the group, those who wanted a break from their own head, or wanted to explore what they were writing in a different way, or who fancied some playtime. We offered one-to-ones to anyone who wanted to chat about anything they wanted. We had cooking teams for the evening veggie meal and lingered long over them with chat and laughter that often took someone (or two or three) out into the January nights for further exploration of our wider world in progess. We were blessed with an astonishing week of snow and ice (far, far from the temperatures of the last year I was working in France when it reached 55° in the sun).
We wrote and researched. Even I wrote for a couple of hours every afternoon, beginning a new long-form piece that had been cooking in the recesses of my imagination for a while. We made new friends. We found commonalities. We were given space, we gave space. We learnt new words, new ideas, and felt safe enough to share ignorances, unknowns, uncertainties and silly things. In short, we did — for those five days — construct a world we wanted to inhabit and nourish and sustain.
Nurturing the seeds of imagination
Some people came with a sense of fraudulence. The original call out was for ‘text-based artists’ — for anyone whose creative practice worked with text in any form — and the word ‘artist’ triggered people’s doubt they were one — who were they to call themselves such? But the artistry that was seeded and flowered and continues to be shared from that week is clear to me. The careful crafting of love and generosity, the sharing, the giving and receiving of intention, and the relishing of beauty and preciousness in life. That confidence was felt across the board, it seemed. It was such a delight that everything came together to make this new form of Imaginarium such a blissful retreat experience.
It takes time for seeds to germinate. The seeds of our imagination don’t come in packets that explain when or where to sow and how long they’ll take to flower. The seeds of our imagination need various soils and weather conditions to nourish them. Our intuition knows these conditions. And perhaps these seeds aren’t too particular or tender. Perhaps they are. Nothing can tell us how long until harvest. We need to water these seeds with faith (by which I mean the fertile mix of trust and confidence), and a selective choice of positive actions (with a sprinkle of learnings).
And perhaps most importantly we need not to over-tend, not insist on a timeframe. Nor over focus, but to encourage with a light touch, accepting other shoots may grow in the soil we’re feeding, that rogue seeds are already in there. All life begins in the dark. The unexpected is inevitable. As a creative spirit it’s easiest to welcome whatever appears and ask: Who are you? How can I help you grow? How can you help my growth? In what world can we thrive?
If you’d like to know about the next Worlds In Progress Retreat that’s happening in January 2026, then head over to this page. We ask for ‘Expressions of Interest’ (by the end of July) to be sure that what you’re wanting is what we’re offering.
In her previous ClimateCultures post, On a Writer’s Imaginarium, Sarah reflects on the various forms of imaginarium she has created over the years as online or offline cross-genre shared spaces to support creative writing.
A poet, performer and artistbook maker focusing on the sea, its ecosystems and its interdependence with people, and the impacts of climate change and pollution.
Artist-writer Jennifer Leach and ecoscenographer-artist Andrea Carr‘s Earth-arts organisation Outrider Anthems invites us into Bullwoman – a dreaming. Their collaborative Portal Theatre project brings everyday reality into rich contact with deeper worlds, suggesting new myths for our times.
1,600 words: estimated reading time = approximately 6.5 minutes
There is a particular sense of happiness in sharing our latest project, Bullwoman – a Dreaming, on ClimateCultures, as we first met at the 2016 TippingPoint climate change conference Doing Nothing is Not an Option, organised and facilitated by Peter Gingold and Mark Goldthorpe. Many of us who met for the first time at that seminal weekend (TippingPoint’s swansong) have gone on to work richly together. Mark was inspired to create ClimateCultures.
The challenge laid down at the conference was how creatives might change hearts and minds, to help humanity return to occupying a humble and balanced place within the ecosystem. So grand a remit is beyond our ambitions, but in this theatre piece we hope to offer the dreamt possibility of a more holistic, integrated way forward.
We are not suggesting an easy ending of ‘happy ever after’, but we do believe that something new wants to happen, something deep wants to come out and express itself…
A portal to dream abodes & myth lands
We have been working on this theatre piece since 2017, and are happy to say it is coming now to fruition, although there are still challenges to overcome, funding being a central one.
Here, we tell our story so far in images and words, explaining more about the piece, its structure and storyline, and our thinking behind it and many of our visual ideas. If you prefer to scroll a continuous slideshow, we have an online pdf presentation: please dive in.
We would really appreciate the engagement and feedback of fellow ClimateCultures members and readers, and any support you feel you might be able to give. In particular, we are looking for a producer, fundraiser and venues. We would welcome too the encouragement of anyone who is stirred, and who wishes to help bring this big and beautiful piece to fruition.
Our introductory gallery (click to enlarge):
The following are a selection of visual images from our research and development process.
Our cast of characters
In the following galleries we give a taster of the characters and the narrative, without attempting to cover every detail of the script and storyline. We start with the Artists in their Studio…
Bullwoman & the Bullpeople
Portal Theatre
The following gallery unfolds elements of our methodology, thinking, and philosophy, and the impetus behind the work.
If you wish to know more about Portal Theatre, see our manifesto.
Working towards new myths
In grappling with these questions:
We have worked with and used our dreams,
We have worked with chance and meaningful synchronicity,
We have drawn on contemporary events and issues — both personal and collective,
We have engaged our imagination,
We have used storytelling and visual theatricality —
to suggest a new myth.
We are aiming to create a flexible and tourable theatre production that can travel to various venues, increasing its reach. There will be a community aspect to it.
In accordance with our vision of Portal Theatre, this will be sustainably achieved in a budget-conscious and resource-conscious way, through the innovative use of sound, film, voice, projection, and design.
Your support – people, partnerships, crowdfunding
We are seeking people and partnerships:
Performers
Venues
Production team
Fundraisers
Funding in the form of grants, sponsorship, patrons
Enthusiasts who can give of their time, interest and skills
We welcome all support, interest and enquiries to outrideranthems@gmail.com
It takes a diverse, skilled community to create and produce a work of theatre, especially in these challenging times.If you feel you could support this venture financially, we would greatly appreciate that too. Please visit Bullwoman’s Crowdfunder.
Thank you.
Find more
You can find more of Jennifer and Andrea’s work together at Outrider Anthems, as well solo work via their websites in the profile links below.
And Jennifer and Andrea took part with fellow ClimateCultures members in Conversations with Work That Connects, a series of lively and engaging conversations that Julia Marques recorded with artists and researchers to explore their experiences with wide-ranging topics that inform the creative work ClimateCultures celebrates.
A poet, writer, performer and storyteller whose wild work, forged in the fantastical reaches of deep imagination, brings to life new stories for our strange times.
A designer and scenographer, and cofounder of Terabac and of EcoStage Pledge, an online initiative to promote sustainability amongst theatre practitioners.
Artist Julien Masson shares a recent community collaboration with artists, residents and businesses, which uses recycled garden furniture, instruments and miscellaneous timber found locally to create public art that reflects a mix of cultures and transform public spaces.
Beyond the materials, the community shapes the ideas. I also run public consultation sessions where local residents and business staff offer input and suggestions. While it’s rarely possible to include every idea, I genuinely love the notion of people discovering their own small suggestions or personal memories hidden inside the finished piece, like a secret message hidden in the work.
Mary Waltham
Excerpts from Selborne Local Landscape Character Assessment (2014) are included here to clarify the position of the site.
Artist and researcher 
Poet and artist-book maker 
Artist-writer 
