Spinney Wild Exchanges

A Fantastical Map of Spinney Wild Woods, created by illustrator Elena Arévalo Melville for CCI.

This intriguing map is our first commission of this sort. Inviting users to explore both the real and the imaginary, it beautifully combines over fifty layers of information drawn from creative work about the woods by the children, poet Jackie Kay and Elena herself.

We often work with ideas of mapping in our Footprints projects.  Children’s individual drawings of journeys in Hinchingbrooke Country Park grew into an enormous ‘Map of maps’.  And in the Spinney Wild Woods fantastical maps were one starting point for Year 1 and Year 3 in their recent project with Jackie Kay. 

From Tavi’s map (Year 3) of under the lake a whole new subterranean land has come to life in the Spinney woods; there are chambers and secret passageways, monsters and electric bats.  Above ground children have found amazing worlds too; head high nettles as green as green can be; a lightening-struck tree whose inside can be ground to gold; palaces, cafés, boats and rockets; desserts, lakes, kingdoms and swamps.

In a new Wild Exchange, following collaborations with writers Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Kay, CCI has invited illustrator Elena Arévalo Melville to develop a new kind of visual map of the Spinney Wild Woods.  It will carry elements of the children’s discoveries and inventions, and have points of actual orientation too.  It will be shaped by Elena’s own experiences in the woods as she spends time sketching and exploring, and it will be used to invite new visitors in.

We have no idea what this fantastical map will look like yet.  Elena described a feeling last week of working like an actual cartographer mapping the wild and unchartered.  Her work for other projects has the subtlety and drama we often find in children’s explorations, and a style which should carry well the many worlds we continue to find in the Spinney Wild Woods.

More of Elena’s work can be seen here www.elenaarevalomelville.com and below are two of her tantalizing on-site sketches from the woods.

(by Deb Wilenski) In the middle of the newly green woods, something is missing.  The lake with its crocodiles, monsters, battles and secret passageways, has disappeared.

The water level rises and falls in the Wild Woods right through the year, but it has never been this low.  Each week I go in early to check the woods before we all come in together, and it’s often a time of surprises; once a fox held my gaze, still, blatant, brave; often there is riotous birdsong that quietens when the children arrive.

But the lake has never been lost before.

I climb over the rope barrier to check the water has really gone, to see how muddy it is.  I walk in a new and weird world: white bones of wood, unreadable ground.  When was the lake last empty like this?  Why does walking on ground once covered by water, feel so uncanny? This word from Beowulf (the text Year 3 brought into the woods) comes back again.  It was perfect for describing the mere in the frost-stiffened woods, and is perfect now for the missing water.

This is our first week working with Jackie Kay.  With what turns out to be characteristic strength and sensitivity, Jackie asks the Year 3 children where the water has gone, and to think about lost things, and secrets.  They rush to enter this newly opened world of the dry lake, and some children spend most of the morning there.  The mud monster’s city expands.  There are bubble monsters in the mud that make it stink, and treasures that rise to the surface – an old bicycle, a bottle with potion inside, a white staff, a huge piece of bark.

(by Deb Wilenski) We are back in the Wild Woods with Year 1 and Year 3, and later this week Jackie Kay will join us too.  Last time we were there barely anything was in leaf, and mud was everywhere.  It was freezing and wet.  This time as Emily in Year 3 put it, it was as green as green can be. 

And how green is that?  As green as head high nettles.  As green as moss growing over every stone.  Kirsten, Lucie and Summer picked up a phrase from Jackie’s poem The world of trees and wrote:  The deep green heart of the wood is bubbling. 

In the afternoon with coloured chalks, pastels, and pencils, we made green in many shades and variations, naming some, leaving others unnamed.  Yellows, blues, greys, browns layered over each other made reptile green, scaly green, a dense forest of dark green, see-through green.

In Year 3’s forest of individually drawn trees, time is very evident.  It takes time to get to know a place so well, and time to draw line by line a single tree that makes your detailed knowledge visible.  Back in the woods time with this class seems literally to fly, the children are fast and their ideas prolific.  The woods of course invite all kinds of exploration – from slow, investigative observation to impulsive, energetic adventure.

(by Deb Wilenski) As children explore wild places they often invent stories.  Many of these new stories have strong echoes of old tales - they tell of magic places, portals, underground monsters, extraordinary powers.  

But sometimes a story begins that is startling in its newness.

On our second visit with Year 1 a café opened in the woods.  It served fat chips and thin chips, there were workers and customers.   I wasn’t with the group of children in the morning that had been playing this game, but I was there in the afternoon when Billy M showed me his drawing:

Billy:  The Fat Chip Café has 200 legs so it can follow us. You might get eaten so you have to stay in it. You are in its mouth but you don’t get eaten.

Ashleigh:  It’ll chase you everywhere you go.

Billy:  It will only get you if you run...now there’s snow coming down and he doesn’t like cold.

As Billy carried on drawing, the Fat Chip Café took on a heroic role, rescuing the woods from danger:

Once upon a time there was a storm, and lightening flashing so hard it bashed into the magic house. Then a man walked outside and he got killed by a monster. Then the big Fat Chip Café jumped on the moon and killed the storm and lightening. He came back home and had a party. The snow is falling down.

In the same woods, on the same morning, another surprising story was beginning by the muddy ditch.  There were royal penguins, a king, queen, princess, and prince.  There were guard penguins with swords and shields.  There was a Penguin Palace to defend with traps. 

Working with young children in woods I have met many creatures, some familiar, some fantastical.  But I never met penguins until now.  In the children’s afternoon drawings water appeared, surrounding the Palace, brilliant blue, with waves made from swirling chalk.

(by Deb Wilenski) This is the first time I have worked with a Year 3 class in the woods and it is truly exciting.  They know exactly what they want to do, they are strong and effective.  The woods are endlessly transformed as they build bridges and dens.  Their imaginative explorations are dramatic and fast, they run through the woods, completely at home and purposeful.  There are boundary disputes when one game claims the territory of another but most of these can be sorted out by the children themselves.

The imaginative, social, physical daring of the children is obvious.  What I begin to wonder about and discuss with Emily, the Year 3 teacher, is how aware the children are of the environment that is such a perfect stage for their play.  What do they notice of the trees, plants, sounds, signs of other life in the woods?  Could we explore this alongside their brilliant games and imaginative explorations?

We decide to ask the children as we begin our afternoon back in the classroom, to think of a tree they know really well.  Maybe one that features in their games, or inventions.  And with graphite pencils we ask them to draw it from memory.

A breathtaking forest emerges.  A detailed, beautiful, known forest of individual trees.  I am taken aback by the time, and careful attention in these drawings, and by what this says of the relationship between children – even in their fastest, most dramatic play – and this world of trees. 

The repeated line in Jackie Kay’s poem comes back to me: 

Sycamore.  Mountain ash.  Beech.  Birch.  Oak.

Individual trees, known, given their precise definition.  As strong and clear as individuals in a class of children.  As connected to each other as friends in a wood.

(by Deb Wilenski) In the Year 3 classroom maps are appearing of the Wild Woods and many are full of monsters.  Tavi’s map is different – a series of linear pathways, tunnels and chambers, drawn on dark paper.  In the top right-hand corner is the lake and at its deepest point a way leads down into his secret underworld.

Tavi’s intriguing map of the world under the lake, and other real and imagined maps from his classmates, are offered to the Year 1 children the following day in the Wild Woods.  We place them in the drawers of the collecting Cabinet from our exhibition ‘This tree is bigger than earth’ and after the usual break for hot chocolate small groups choose a map with which to begin new explorations.

(By Deb Wilenski) Before our project started Year 3 teacher Emily took her class to the woods to read parts of Beowulf there.  The murky lake and sometimes shadowy undergrowth in the Wild Woods seem made for this oldest of tales:

A few miles from here

A frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch

Above a mere; the overhanging bank

Is a maze of tree roots mirrored in its surface.

At night there, something uncanny happens:

The water burns.  And the mere bottom

Has never been sounded by the sons of men.

(Beowulf ,translated by Seamus Heaney)

Beowulf’s epic battles with the ‘shadow-stalker’ Grendel and his monstrous mother are still very live in the children’s imaginations and it hasn’t taken them long to discover more monsters in the land:

JJ:  I found this ditch called the awesome ditch

Sevgi:  It’s called the mouth of the mud monster

Antonia:  The whole of that ditch is made of the mud monster and the mud monster has two heads, and there are two ditches. 

In the afternoons we have looked at old maps and the monsters that roam there, discussed maps as fact and maps as fiction, shared our thoughts about what makes a monster.  The Year 3 children have been mapping the Wild Woods from their own physical and imaginative experience, including the world deep underground.

The trees knew each other’s secrets

in the deep green heart of the forest.

Each tree loved another tree best.

Each tree happy to rest, leaned a little to the east,

or to the west, when the moon loomed high above:

the big white eye of the woods.

(from The world of trees by Jackie Kay)

(by Deb Wilenski) The children in Year 1 know their woods intimately.  Last year, in Reception, they were the first class to come into the newly opened space and make it their own, and coming back now they are quickly at home again, beginning new explorations, re-visiting familiar places. 

Given such close connection and knowledge of the woods, I was intrigued to see how we could work with an opposite relationship back in the classroom – exploring the Wild Woods as unfamiliar, dark, different.  We began by imagining the woods in deep night-time, using part of Jackie Kay’s poem The world of trees to help us begin, and a simple shadow projection of the moon in a dark sky rising over tree-tops.  The children continued to work all afternoon with light and shadow, moon stories, dark drawings and collage, and the fantastic possibilities brought by the night. 

In Billy’s drawing a man is trapped between the trees and sticks are coming down about to fall on him – at the last moment a tiny door appears through which the man can escape. 

(by Deb Wilenski) We are in the Wild Woods, half way through our first visit with Year 1.  Four boys are caught in quicksand.  Two girls are battling through brambles.  I don’t think they will want to stop for words – but I am wrong.

Introduced as a game, face down on pieces of torn white paper, words and phrases from Jackie Kay’s poem The World of Trees were offered to the children and they responded with excitement and reflection, taking time to find exactly the right place for the words to live in their woods.

 ‘Dreaming’ appeared in a tangle of creepers.  You go inside a dream there Sofia explained.

‘Waiting for another tree’ lay patiently amongst the roots of a tree already growing.

‘The leaves fluttered their wings’ was placed in ivy that moved with every breeze.

All of this is a great forest.  Inside the forest is the child.  The forest is beautiful, fascinating, green, and full of hopes; there are no paths.  Although it isn't easy, we have to make our own paths, as teachers and children and families, in the forest. 
Loris Malaguzzi speaking on education in 1993

(by Deb Wilenski) Next week we head back into the Spinney Wild Woods with a new project as part of our Wild Exchange work.  And at this beginning stage, there are many new paths to find.  We have often worked with nursery age and Reception children (3 to 5 year olds), but this time we go with children from Year 1 and Year 3 (5 to 8 year olds).  On four of our twelve sessions we will be joined by writer and poet Jackie Kay, who will explore the woods alongside us, and bring her own wild words and influences into the project.  We will pick up too from where last year’s Reception class led us (many of whom will return as part of the Year 1 group), with discoveries that still resonate – the magic house, the muddy place, the rocket ship, the tree that is ‘bigger than earth’.

I know there will be paths that seem clear and ordinary, and ordinary paths that run straight into the fantastic too.  I plan to work with the sense I had with this first class, of children’s explorations running parallel with other journeys in human history, in particular the half ‘real’ half fantastical accounts of explorers from earlier centuries.  There will be plenty of time for this as we work together in the classroom for the afternoon.

Around this time last year, I remember Kelvin watching a worm in the woods and saying:  It’s a snake.  When will it be a snake?  With our emphasis in this new project on writing, words, and representing wildness, I wonder what Kelvin might think of this account, taken from a miscellany compiled by Chinese travel writer Wang Tai-hai in 1791?

The Monkey of the Inkpot

This animal, common in the north, is four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow.  It is marked by a curious instinct – the taste for India ink.  When a person sits down to write, the monkey sits cross-legged nearby with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over.  Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied.
(Wang Tai-hai quoted in Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings)