Alongside our work in schools, we carefully plan ways to involve everyone in our work, inviting people of all ages and backgrounds to collaborate and contribute.

Ever since CCI began, our work has involved people of all ages in all sorts of spaces including  woods and nature reserves, hospitals, libraries, playgrounds, new developments and even a recycling centre. 

We think of ourselves as creative companions to children and everybody who supports and cares for them (families, educators, neighbours, friends and other professionals). The invitation to be an artscaper is extended to each person no matter what their age. This work gives everyone a voice as the world shifts and changes, and foregrounds the wisdom and authority of children and young people as they imagine a better future. Ultimately, artscaping is about learning to care for - and take care of - ourselves, our communities, and our natural world, from the ground to the sky. As CCI’s patron Robert Macfarlane has said, “We find it hard to love what we can’t give a name to and what we do not love, we will not save.” 

Fantastical Maps celebrate a community's creative discoveries. There are now seven maps in the collection. Each re-maps an actual landscape but seen through the eyes of the creative artscapers we work alongside. Many have 100 layers or more. 

More about our work with communities:

Hangings on display at Wandlebury

Fantastical Forest

CCI’s annual celebration of creativity, community and the natural world.

 Teddy bear in hospital bed

Taking Note

Our three-year collaboration with Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

 box of art materials

Creative Care

CCI’s suite of resources designed to support families be creative in lockdown.

 Busy workshop with parents and small children

A Changing City

Giving communities a voice as our places develop.

  • Wonder and education are two of the essential survival skills. We cannot wish our way out of the ecological crisis, but we might be able to grow our way out of it — and surprisingly fast, too. Things are changing from the ground up: new generations emerging who are holding government to account, calling for us to be better ancestors.
    CCI is part of this work of growth. Sometimes I think of what CCI does as a kind of 'practical dreaming': imagining new and fantastical ways of being in the world which root deep in minds and imaginations, and from there grow into reality.

    Rob Macfarlane, writer and CCI Patron

  • I think it’s like a fuse being ignited because once you start with it, everything you do you think about in a different way…..It makes you rethink everything and kind of question are you really doing it in the best way you can. I felt like I was visiting myself every week – I just felt like I’d met myself again.

    Teachers feedback, Creativity as Practice course

  • As the world struggles with a climate emergency, a Covid crisis, and a racial injustice crisis, there can be no better time to imagine how things could be different. Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination is an inspiring example, showing that learning and teaching can be re-imagined and that the next generation is not bound to repeat the mistakes of the past.

    Daniel Zeichner, MP Cambridge

You may be interested in

words on a compass
The Companionship Compass

This training resource was co-created with young artscapers and is designed support new community artscapers as they learn to lead art-in-nature nurture groups.

 Child holding their drawing and pointing at distant building site
Children as Place-makers

A panel discussion in the 2021 Cambridge Festival about the work of Artscapers joined by colleagues from similar programmes in Bath and Berlin.