Wild Exchanges
William Seale recording sounds in the water & map of different pitches by Cleo (age 7)
Children are creative and surprising thinkers – current CCI projects Artscapers, Fantastical Cambridgeshire and Animating the Archives make this richly obvious. In our project diaries we give children’s own words, images and inventions public recognition. We also make them visible because we believe there is fascinating material there for other people to explore.
Wild Exchanges take this advocacy one step further, formally introducing children’s ideas into the working realms of professional adults, as inspiration for new work or prompts to reflect on their own fascinations. CCI artist Deb Wilenski is the ‘creative connector’ in these exchanges and explains how they work:
Wild exchanges began a while ago when we asked writer Rob Macfarlane to write a foreword to our Fantastical Guide to Hinchingbrooke Country Park, and when poet Jackie Kay joined primary school children in the Spinney Wild Woods to make new work together.
Our recent series of exchanges from Fantastical Cambridgeshire locations takes a more minimalist approach; I search for a key image, thought, or way of exploring that children have made or discovered, and offer this to adult professionals with whose work it seems to be connected. I have invited a wide range of people into conversation – artists and writers, but also botanists, documentary film directors, sound specialists and research scientists.
At times I have drawn unlikely comparisons, but these have frequently turned out to be the most fascinating exchanges; we have discovered intriguing connections between a housing development in St Neots and the wilds of Antarctica, or the empathy and imagination of a 7 year old and the skills of a wildlife film maker.
Our Wild Exchanges are collected below and can be read in any order. We are also developing a series of games which pick up threads from the exchanges. These often form part of our workshops. Children, families and educators took them into the Forest of Imagination in Bath earlier this year and they will also be part of our workshops in Emmanuel College gardens for the Festival of Ideas. The games will soon be available as a resource for others to use in their own spaces too.
Wild eagles arrive in the Offords’ Millennium Green
(by Deb Wilenski) What do creative explorations add to the identity of a place and the people who live there? For every location in our Fantastical Cambridgeshire projects there are already official maps, showing points of orientation, possible journeys, historic and current landmarks. Mapping children’s imagined and newly discovered details doesn’t mean that conventional maps have no significance – but it does suggest that places and identities can also be played with and that this kind of play has value.
Looking back over the three project residencies I’m struck by the fact that a place is not just geographical or historical. Its identity has also to do with who you can be there. In Eynesbury, the Offords and Love’s Farm children deepened their connections to immediate locations by asking: who else can I be in this place? what would it be like?
From hearing the story of James Toller (the ‘Eynesbury Giant’), to the Offord children’s explorations as other people and other animals and the powerful presence of Minerva and her Parliament of Owls at Love’s Farm, children have relished the adventure that other identities bring.
Children’s drawings of James Toller and Minerva (Round House Academy)
Our current education system often puts pressure on children to pursue their individual ambitions and to be the best you can be. There is little space for being someone else and seeing how it feels. Yet empathy is being recognised across many fields, including education, as a vital skill for the future.
In his reflections below Kevin Jones, who was Headmaster at St John’s College School (Cambridge) for 26 years and is a passionate advocate for creativity in education, reflects on identity, empathy and understanding, prompted by our Fantastical Cambridgeshire experiences.
Kevin Jones and children from St John’s College School
Imagining being other (by Kevin Jones)
Of all the wonders of the Fantastical Offord project, it was Ava’s map that struck me most.
It offered an aerial view of the orchard, complete with a key for the shapes that represented trees, my house, stones, human thing, pond and fffffox. There was the mysterious gate that monsters come through, and beyond the mysterious gate there was a mysterious world. And this mysterious world that monsters came from was the school playground, and the monsters were us, the humans. Ava had made the most wonderful leap of imagination, into the mind of a fox. This was the fox’s map. It showed the world through an animal’s eyes and in the fox’s eyes we humans were the dangerous animals. This wonderful act of imagining shifts our view and makes us empathise, as Ava does, with a different view of the world.
Of all the things our children learn, perhaps the most important for them and for our world is to be able to map the minds of others, to imagine being other, to learn to read how others might think and see.
Empathy comes to the young as naturally as the leaves come to the trees but it needs the right conditions to thrive. It needs to be fed and nurtured. It grows in the example we set to children, in kindness witnessed and received by them. But we also need to make space and time for it to blossom in our schools. Our education system often drives children to focus on their own individual attainment, usually in a narrow academic sense. We need to balance this with opportunities for them to look beyond themselves, to use their curiosity and imagination.
That is what the Fantastical Offords project offered to Ava – a space to be curious and to imagine. And with what wonderful results for her and for all of the children.
Ava and Molly getting a snake’s eye view
The mysterious orchard itself becomes, in their descriptions and in their art, a living being with a character – which of course it is, only we don’t usually see it so clearly or so sympathetically.
Leopard eyes in the orchard (Chelsea, age 8)
Look at the messages left for the Robin group’s visit to the Orchard by the older children – sometimes cryptic, sometimes challenging, always generous in spirit and filled with a sense of what it will be like for their younger friends to arrive with new eyes.
Fox den in the right hand corner – a message left for the 5 and 6 year old children
With their curiosity and imagination released, the children readily see through other people’s eyes. Imagining themselves inhabiting the Millennium Green as different people opens up the children’s sense of their community, their belonging, and produces wonderful writing in voices other than their own.
The children use this space for empathy to produce outstanding work. But there is more to it than this. They are seeing beyond themselves and understanding different viewpoints. And we seem to need this now more than ever in our world, to build communities, to break down barriers between people and to see beyond prejudice. That is why it is so important that children can make maps from other minds, imagine being other. What Ava is doing, what all of the children are doing, is mapping a way to a better world.
Offord community, their shadows and the enormous beetle (photo credit: Majiek Platek)
(by Deb Wilenski) How do places get their names? How do you name a new place where nobody has lived before? CCI’s third Fantastical Cambridgeshire project with Round House Primary Academy took place on the Love’s Farm development in St Neots. This 160 acre new-build site has over 1400 homes, a primary school, shops, open space and community facilities and was entirely constructed and named between 2009 and 2017. During CCI’s project the school children played with renaming their streets, landmarks and empty spaces with a strong sense of imagination and adventure.
I wondered who we could involve in a wild exchange about naming and human habitation. I couldn’t help thinking of a place with recent human history that on the face of it seemed as far away as you could get from a Cambridgeshire housing development. But as you will read in the conversation below there are fascinating parallels between Love’s Farm and the continent of Antarctica; a place seen for the first time only 200 years ago making it the most recently occupied and named place on earth.
There is another interesting comparison too. The homogenous 21st century architecture of Love’s Farm stands on fascinating archaeological ground. An ancient map sits beneath the new map on the surface. Look up Antarctica on google maps and no matter how far you zoom in, the vast central ice sheets remain empty and white. But what lies beneath? It turns out that there is a map of invisible Antarctica which reveals a very different land.
I interviewed Dr Kevin Hughes, Environmental Research and Monitoring Manager at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) about names for new places and underground maps. From an unlikely geographical comparison, we set off on a fascinating journey.
Q: Does the comparison I’ve drawn between the newness of developments like Love’s Farm and the wilds of Antarctica make sense to you? Are there similarities in how we create a human map of these places?
When I first thought about this exchange, I thought how does this work? But actually the idea of coming to a new place in the UK, naming the streets and creating an identity, there is a comparison. In Antarctica you’ve got a whole continent that has only had human beings fully aware that it is even there for less than 200 years. 1819 was the first time it was ever set foot on.
We produce maps of the Peninsula (the part of Antarctica claimed by the UK) at the British Antarctic Survey. There are lots of names on the map and they have all been officially recognised by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee. I talked to one of the people on the committee yesterday and he pointed me towards this book (Antarctic Peninsula: A Visitor’s Guide), the last chapter of which is all about place names.
The Antarctic Peninsula
Q: Is naming a place in Antarctica a complex procedure? How does it work?
It’s an official meeting now but there are a discreet number of people who meet and deliver names in as consistent a way as they can. A lot of the Antarctic Peninsula is named after the people who first went there. The first sealers went up to King George Island, named after King George IV because they were planting the flag for Britain. But there have been expeditions by the French, by the Belgians, more French, by the British, the Swedish, and they all stamp their own names on the different areas. On the website of the Antarctic Place-Names Committee apc.antarctica.ac.uk you can zoom in anywhere you like, every one of the red dots is a name and it will tell you where that name has come from.
So that’s one way of naming. Another way is having themes. You have to bear in mind that a lot of these areas were explored sequentially and so it depended what was prominent at the time. Some of them are named after composers and music. We’ve got Beethoven Peninsula, Monteverdi Peninsula, Shostokovitch Peninsula. This season I’m going to a place called Finlandia Foothills, named after Sibelius’ Finlandia Suite. But also there’s an area where they’ve named glaciers and mountains after Irish musical instruments or there are names from Moby Dick, Churchill’s War Cabinet, Homer’s Iliad, it can look quite random.
Q: In Love’s Farm the children named some places according to their physical appearance – a huge clearing was called The Vast Vacation or there was Hairy Swamp and Shredded Wheat Hole. Other names were emotionally evocative; The Cornfield of Happiness, Snake Shadow, Bleeding Heart Close. Are there names like these in Antarctica?
There’s a good example here it’s called Deception Island. It’s actually a collapsed volcanic caldera, which is still active, so you can sail through and be completely surrounded by this ring of rock. It’s called Deception Island because you don’t know what you’re going to get until you sail inside. In many places there are features that are named after the physical nature of the place, or things that happened on the day it was first visited; Cape Disappointment, Inexpressible Island.
Map and aerial photograph of Deception Island
Q: When you go to the Finlandia Foothills how will the naming process work, can anyone suggest a name?
We’ll spend the day on the hill doing our sampling and our remote sensing and at the end of the day we’ll be quite tired and hungry and we’ll cram into our little pyramid tent and make our dinner. We’ll start thinking what shall we talk about tonight? I know, let’s talk about what we’re going to name some of these features. We’ll just chat about it and see if anything comes to mind, or we’ll think up a particular theme.
And what makes something worthy of being named?
As far as I understand we tend to give names to things that need a name. If you’ve got a management plan or you’ve got an operational reason or it’s a prominent feature for navigation, it will get a name. Otherwise where would you stop? In the Finlandia Foothills we’ll probably name some of the mountains, some of the valleys, some of the ice streams.
The second comparison I drew between Love’s Farm and Antarctica was the striking contrast between the surface map and what lies underneath. I imagined that under the Antarctic ice is another invisible land. Do we know what is there?
In the centre you’re talking about up to 4 kilometres of ice on top of the landscape, this high dome of ice which covers the bottom of the world. It’s considered there’s no life of any real substance underneath the ice. On the surface of the ice you might have a few microorganisms that have fallen out of the sky, or been blown up into the sky and rained down and over tens of thousands of years they’ll get buried and become part of the ice but they are only a tiny fraction and they will be unviable.
Saying that, if we take Lake Vostok which is one of around 400 sub-glacial lakes (liquid lakes under up to 2.5 kilometres or more of ice) the theory is that in some cases they may have been completely isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, and there might have been independent evolution of these microbial species.
But what I can show you is this. This map is called Bedmap 2 and the idea is to map what is underneath the ice.
These Transantarctic Mountains that just about poke through on the other map are actually a massive chain. And the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains, these are the size of the Alps, but they’re completely buried. The only reason we know they’re there is because of ground penetrating radar. These are the sorts of graphs they produce, that show different ice structures but also the surface of mountains, the topography under the ice.
Q: Do you get excited about working there still? This is the first time I’m looking in detail at these maps and it’s amazing.
I do! I work as a biologist in the geo-politics of environmental protection but there are people in my organisation who are absolute world experts on what’s beneath the ice, and what that tells us about the geology, what it tells us about how Antarctica came together. Because 30 million years ago there was no ice in Antarctica.
Q: What does it feel like when you are somewhere nobody has been before, standing on a continent which so few people have ever seen or mapped?
If you’re on a research station it can often be quite busy and cramped and actually quite claustrophobic. The difference is, if you go deep-field, you get dropped off by your little aircraft, and you’re there with your mountaineer who’s going to help you out, and the same kit that was used by Scott 100 years ago, it hasn’t been really improved upon… then you realise I’m on an island, with someone else, and this island’s the size of Wales and we’re the only people here and we know we’re the only two people. It’s amazing.
Kevin counting penguins on Lagotellerie Island, Antarctica
Snowdrops and superpowers
22/08/2017
(by Deb Wilenski) For our day with the oldest children at Offord Primary School, we took real and fantastical plant life as our focus. Both the school orchard and the Millennium Green are rich botanical environments and we had already found green walnuts to make ink, as well as gigantic thistles, a ‘pink tree my nan planted’, and tiny plants growing on molehills.
We took as our inspiration the plant-hunters and illustrators of past centuries, who often took huge risks to obtain specimens or record them. The children fully embraced the idea of botanical adventuring. They climbed high in trees, explored tangled undergrowth, and crossed water in the Millennium Green by balancing along a fallen tree to get to ‘the island’.
I shared some of the children’s detailed discoveries and fantastical drawings with Flis Plent, Head of Learning at Cambridge University Botanic Garden and a director of BGEN (Botanic Garden Education Network) and asked four questions to explore the connections between the children’s explorations and her own memories, experience and specialist knowledge.
Her answers below are full of wonderful stories and observations - of seed collectors past and present, a terrible-smelling plant, snowdrops with chemical superpowers and an oak tree that smells, fantastically, of lavender.
How far have you travelled as a plant hunter and did you find what you were looking for?
I haven’t travelled to hunt for plants but recently one of our horticulturalists travelled to Vietnam on a plant hunting expedition. They were looking for lots of very rare plants and were lucky enough to find seeds of some of them which we will now grow back here at the Botanic Garden. Here is a picture of the seeds they brought back drying out on sheets of newspaper in their hotel room in Vietnam.
Seed drying
Hundreds of years ago plant hunters risked their lives searching for new plants all over unexplored parts of the world. They didn’t have hotel rooms to dry their plants in, and often slept in the open air or in small tents. Some of the stories of their adventures are quite hair-raising, with tales of them being attacked by tigers, swept away by raging rivers and getting lost regularly in dense jungles and up snow-covered mountains.
What is the most other-worldly plant in the Botanic Garden and what makes it so strange?
I think the strangest plant we have here is the Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum) which flowered here quite recently. This amazing plant is from Sumatra in Indonesia. Here is a picture of it as it was opening in our Glasshouse Range in June this year.
It doesn’t flower very often, but when it does the flower structure is absolutely huge. Ours was 1.36m, but they can be as big as 3m tall. On the first night that it opens the white structure in the middle, called the spadix, heats up and produces the most terrible, terrible smell – a bit like rotting flesh or stinky cheese. The smell is produced to attract beetles which pollinate it. When it flowers it also attracts huge numbers of visitors to the Garden. We stayed open at night so people could come to visit it and smell it – even though the smell is terrible. I love hearing what our visitors think it smelled of. Here are some of the things they told me: It is worse than the smelliest socks ever…It smells like my brother’s trainers… It smells like my baby sister’s nappy…It smells just like the food bin in our kitchen when nobody empties it.
Are there plants which are surprisingly strong or surprisingly delicate in the gardens?
One of my favourite plants are snowdrops. They look really delicate and flower at the coldest time of the year. But they have superpowers – inside the cells of the plant are chemicals which act a bit like anti-freeze (like the stuff you might spray on a car window in the winter to melt the ice). So even when it is freezing and snowing these brave little plants can still hold their heads up high!
If you could combine any two plants which would you choose and what would their plant ‘offspring’ look like?
I love plants which smell nice, like lavender and honeysuckle and I also love old gnarled trees that live for a long time, like oak trees. So if we could combine a huge oak tree covered with flowers with the scent of lavender that would be amazing!
The Black Ground: Bideford Black
03/08/2017
(by Deb Wilenski) The last day of our Fantastical Cambridgeshire residency at Offord Primary School was spent making a whole school ‘map of the night’, picking up children’s shared and strong interests in night-time creatures, sounds and stories.
Thinking forwards to the Fantastical Offords Map that Elena would make, I decided to offer a way for the children to invent and name their own night colours – mixing the last of our home-made walnut ink with acrylic paints, charcoal and chalk pastels. I hoped some of their invented colours would help determine the dark palette of the map itself.
The children’s enthusiasm for this process, and the beautiful, poetic list of names for black that emerged, led me to look for a ‘wild exchange’ about darkness, journeys, colour processing and naming. Visual artist and researcher Lydia Halcrow came to CCI’s Fantastical Mapping event at the Forest of Imagination in Bath, and she turned out to be the perfect exchange partner.
In her written and illustrated ‘journey’ below, Lydia shares some of her own work with Bideford Black Pigment, responding to the children’s names for black and their experiments with colour, place and map-making.
(by Lydia Halcrow) The blackest black, Bideford Black, once mined, once useful, now trodden over, overlooked, over trodden. I start walking on ‘The Black Ground’ - it’s an area of shingle accessible at low tide at the point where the Torridge and Taw estuaries meet, it leads me along the river Taw towards Barnstaple, past rusting hulls of ships now marooned along the banks of the silted up river, past concrete and metal jetties reaching out like crumbling arms into the water, waiting for a cargo that comes no more, past the remains of the power station, served by a river that holds no ships and a railway that holds no trains. As I walk along the Taw Estuary, at low tide the soils shift and change, I step over clay, first red then silver, onto sand then mud flats, feet sinking fast.
Abandoned ship Taw Estuary
The walks are in some small way a means to record and map this place and my experience of walking there, this embodied experience, this experience of embodiment. An antidote to the smooth screen of the digital age. A way to feel the land, the texture of the ground underfoot, to mark time with my feet, to unpick the surface and find remnants of past histories and other feet and creatures that have gone before me. Then as the estuary narrows a little towards the old port of Fremington Quay, once an epicentre for trade of pots and clay with the names of ships on the museum logs as a small echo of the past:
Gladonia
Mado II
Julia
Rika
Austerity
Kathleen May
Result
Enid
De Wadden
Narwal Tweelg
Here as the river narrows slightly and becomes more river than conjoined with sea, here with my bare hands I can scrape a little of the black, black earth and press it between my fingers. It is waxy like the make-up it once made, like a black lipstick, a kohl disguise. And the metal plates I wear under foot record the textures of the ground I have passed along, the scratches and lines etched into them oddly mirror the sand at low tide after the sea has left its tiny wave like indents.
Metal Plates
Here I collect just a little of the earth and take it home, where I dry it, grind it to the lightest of powers and mix it with printing oil, bashing it down and smoothing it out over and over again with a heavy stone pestle to make an ink to print from. Here I put the inked up plates in a printing press to make a record of the contact of my boots with the ground.
Here I draw small sketches onto OS Map 139 that I use to navigate, in the blackest of inks, Bideford Black Pigment sometimes smeared on top. The drawings are snapshots of this landscape that submerges me. As I finish one, I start another with a few more footsteps in between. Slowly each segment of the map fills up and then I paint over it, with a watered down white – the antithesis to all of this black. It half buries the drawings, but they are still there, small ghost images poke through of past histories and my past existence in this place. And then I start again, the walk continues and so too do the drawings. Another layer as I move forwards, all the time measuring the texture of the ground with my feet and the metal plates. All the time recording the shapes I make using the GPS of my phone in my back pocket – so technology has its uses after all….
The Black Ground ii
As I walk and as I record I wonder if my own map, that engulfs the OS map beneath is more accurate, a more honest description of this place and its materials than the roads, paths and contours that lie partially submerged beneath. How is it possible to map and record a place in all its complexities and histories, all its layers and ambiguities. How are these materials of this place but also part of its history and use, its industry and settlers? What small marks do I leave behind as I pass through it, how long will they last? How can I record them?
I think about the water, the endless ebb and flow of the tides, rising up the mud flat and the beaches, up to the ships, salt water adding to the rust, speeding up its entropy. I work with ink and ice, melted onto paper to try and draw time, as the ice melts the black inky mixture makes its way across the paper, the ambient temperature dictating its speed, the density of the ink as the water evaporates. Thicker lines of ink mark a pause in progress before the water moves onwards, taking more paper, moving across this miniature landscape.
Ice Drawing iii
I wonder why the black pigment, the black ink and pen draw me towards them, I think that perhaps in this world of infinite possibilities and endless decisions, the black and the white is comforting. The materials come from the ground, just as all life does if we trace it back far enough, just as we all will if we trace life forward. By limiting the materials to black and white and the greys between, the texture and the layers emerge as the focus, the drawings and paintings become the surface and are about the surface, the ground underfoot.
Lydia is a visual artist and researcher based in the South West who makes paintings, drawings and prints that respond to walks in a place and to a sense of abandonment or entropy. She has an MA in Fine Art and is currently working towards a Practice-Based Fine Art PhD. You can explore more of Lydia’s work here www.lydiahalcrow.com
We seriously did see a spaniel
14/07/2017
(by Deb Wilenski) In CCI’s Fantastical Cambridgeshire projects with school children we often see a lively exchange of ideas and approaches to exploring; the many ways children invent to journey together into familiar and unfamiliar locations make an intriguing list. We decided to take some of these ways to the Forest of Imagination, a four-day festival at the University of Bath, to see if other children and adults in a different location, might like to explore in these ways too. Independent artist Laura Magnavacchi also joined us to help facilitate and document the workshops and try out the games as a new way of working with children for herself.
Game 1 – Maps and messages from other minds
We offered children’s hand-drawn maps from locations in Cambridgeshire and invited people to use these to navigate around the Forest of Imagination, recording what they discovered in words and images.
Small rolls of paper with ‘messages’ from the children at Offord primary School invited participants to explore the Forest as other animals or other people, because as Martha (age 7) said: If you learn to explore like a mouse you can learn to explore like anything.
Game 2 – A city gone wild
The theme of the festival was Where we feel at home and focussed on exchanges between urban and wild spaces. We offered a wealth of printed images from sources as diverse as children’s den-building in our Fantastical Cambridgeshire locations, houses designed by children in our ArtScapers projects, intricate structures made by animals and ‘wild’ architectural design. We invited visitors to use these in collage, drawing and projections to build a new ‘city gone wild’.
Game 3 – Mapping from dusk to dawn
We played a compilation of wild sounds recorded by bio-acoustic engineer William Seale, alongside two large-scale visual prompts from illustrator Elena Arévalo Melville - a list of ‘names for black’ invented by Offord Primary School children making colours for night-time and a long night pathway inspired by Elena’s Fantastical Offords map.
The taxidermy fox sat quietly in the night corner, where dark cushions and eye pillows encouraged people to lie down, listen, travel into the night, then add drawings to our map of night-time.
Classes from Swainswick Primary School, Twerton Infant School and St Andrew’s Primary School tried these out for us on Friday whilst on other days people dropped in and played together, often coming back to add more to their work as new ideas came to them.
The games helped to transform the space at Edge Arts, filling the room with new ideas and creations shaped by this community. We will be publishing the games for others to play with in the autumn so keep in touch on info@cambridgecandi.org.uk if you’d like to know more.
