"From the Land to the Skies"

About

About the Projects

Connecting disadvantaged young people with landscape through arts 

Over the course of 2021-22 selected artists came together with people from multiple local communities in a variety of outdoor settings to connect with nature producing art conveying meanings of landscape through multiple perspectives and senses. 

‘From the Land to the Sky’ is the culmination of these collaborations and a celebration of the artwork co-created by local artists with the communities they worked with. The exhibition combines outputs from two related projects, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 

This project was led by academics at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) who belong to The Centre for Children and Young People’s Participation. The views of marginalised groups, and particularly young people, are often disregarded in decision-making about land-use and landscape. So, we helped children and young people to visit natural outdoor environments close to where they live - but where they seldom went. Thinking about those outdoor spaces, the artists worked with the groups to document their experiences in a whole range of exciting ways – resulting in the exhibits here. We all hope that their work will help you to think about young people’s perspectives on connecting with nature - how to understand nature’s workings; how to create more opportunities to be in and with nature; and how natural environments might be made more accessible to all children and young people. 

Multisensory multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in changing landscape 

This project was led by academics from the Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS) at Edge Hill University with colleagues from the University of Central Lancashire. Decisions about landscapes are usually made from a human perspective but what happens when we think about those spaces and places from the point of view of another being: an animal, a plant or a tree? We used multispecies storytelling to capture the voices of marginalised communities and disadvantaged groups; those who don’t usually have a say in decisions about landscapes and landscape use. To explore a variety of different ways of making sense of the world we invited artists to work with groups and communities to develop their responses to a variety of locations and spaces. Workshops took place at a farm, at different nature reserves, and on an allotment. Work in this exhibition is the result of imagining what it means to share natural environments with other fauna and flora.

Funded by: UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, University of Central Lancashire and Edge Hill University.