wildlife celebrations masterclass

A creative masterclass

From bumblebee lanterns to hedgehog flags,

Fierce faces to friendly frog masks,

Spinning stories from footprints, leaves and feathers

Make a pop-up minibeast landscape

river hats and finger puppets

 Join me for a day of creative adventuring

celebrating wildlife through art

SATURDAY 22ND OCTOBER

 NORTON PRIORY, RUNCORN
 

tiny fish lantern

10AM - 3PM  

AND IT’S FREE!

Come along to...

• Gather ideas about how you could spark action to help local wildlife

• Get inspired about making a centrepiece for your wildlife garden

• Try out different techniques using natural and recycled materials

• Get expert advice about what might work for you!

All you need to bring with you is... 

• a notepad and pen to make notes

• comfortable shoes and a coat or sun cream (depending on the weather!)

• bags of enthusiasm for getting creative!

Lunch will be provided, so please let us know if you have any specific dietary requirements

To sign up for the masterclass please contact Manon Keir on

01244 389 828 or email m.keir@chesterzoo.org
 

There are limited spaces available so get in touch soon to secure your place!

owl flag

Peeling Back the Layers

Dove Valley Centre - we are anticipating sunshine!

 Once upon a time 

in the Upper Dove Valley…

Peeling Back The Layers

Saturday June 25th

 Dove Valley Centre

11am – 4pm

 will we find a long house? a square?

As the shovels swing and the trowel dig and careful fingers lift on this exciting community archaeology project in the Upper Dove Valley, Buxton Museum’s Collections in the Landscape project will be at the Open Day in this beautiful dale

With the shapes of houses emerging in the field and (hopefully) artefacts being unearthed, our artist and event leader Gordon MacLellan from Creeping Toad will be there to help on speculation:

what are we finding?

what was here?

what could it have looked like…

…visitors will be encouraged to look at finds

to study those tempting shapes in the field

to consider the survey results

and to wonder at change: in 1000 years have the hills changed? how has the dale altered, would those older people still recognise the hills of their home

a changed landscape?

Mixing information with imagination, Gordon will help people build their own house and farm models to add to our imagined settlement – and then to take home afterwards

Over the afternoon we will gradually build the ancient (or not so ancient) settlement of Under Whitle

Peeling Back the Layers is a hands-on educational project, run by the Tudor Farming Interpretation Group (TFIG).  A wide range of people are investigating the history and archaeology of Whitle, Sheen and the surrounding landscape.  Groups and individuals are joining together with the primary and secondary schools, young archaeologists, local history enthusiasts and mental health groups in this fascinating exploration of our local heritage.

roundhouses? probably not

This event is free and materials or tools are provided.

No booking is needed, just come to the Centre, wonder at the view as you stroll down into the valley and join us for an afternoon enjoying uncertainty, discovery and speculation 


Finding us: the event is at the Dove Valley Centre, on the road between Longnor and Sheen, postcode, SK17 0PR

Summer stories: workshops for schools and public events 2016

Summer stories

Stories in school

and other excitements

with Creeping Toad,

Summer 2016

celebrating the richness of the season, here are stories, 

sculptures, flags, books and  boggarts

With stories spinning from the first signs of spring right through to earth giants, summer flowers and thunder-tigers, here are stories and activities to enchant and inspire.

a small story-house

Drawing on 30 years of professional experience, my work blends environmental experience with creativity. “Much of my work uses storytelling and story making but I also make small masks, giant masks, flags, lanterns, pop-up landscapes and create wild and wonderful occasions”

Scottish Tour dates: 

April 25th - May 6th

September 5th - 16th

Dates for England & Wales:  

just about any other time - I tend to plan trips as bookings come in

These notes are written for schools. if you have a community grouup or fancy a public event these might give you a guide to what wee might do but talk to me about your specific situation...

a group telling their own stories,  Woodland Trust 2015

In school

A day’s visit to your school might include:

storytelling performances: lasting up to 60 minutes for up to 90 children at a time 

stories out of anything! outdoors or in, we'll use leaves and pine cones, twigs and stones and shells to inspire words, create poems and shape a set of stories never told before

(allow 60 minutes for a class session)

New workshop!

headfulls and handfuls of river animals

puppets and headfulls of animals: like the illustration, we can make quick finger puppet animals or magnificent animal crowns. Allow an hour and a half for a class

New workshop!

Heroes for stories: building characters - as quick puppets and as written pieces: capturing the qualities of our characters for stories: their ambitions, triumphs, disasters and secrets - skills for a richer tale

make your own book

story and book workshops: taking a bit longer (allow 90 minutes for a class) as well as discovering those stories no-one has ever heard before, now we will build those into the books that no-one has ever read before and leave the classroom with a library no-one has ever visited before!

pop-up storyscapes: allow an hour for a class: gathering ideas, images and words we’ll make quick 3-d landscapes holding the essence of a story in a setting, key characters and the words that set the adventure running

tales of old Scotland: a collection of stories of Highland folklore and Scottish histories, of heroes and sorrows, bravery and the magics of sea, mountain and moor

Ancient Lives:  a wider historical perspective could be involved, by adding a voice from the distant past to your history topics with stories that our Stone, Bronze or Iron Age ancestors might have listened to. Stories, models, artefacts and drawings can feed into art inspired by cave paintings, carvings and jewellery

your own themes and ideas: or are you exploring a particular theme that you would like to involve some stories in? In recent projects we have also made talking stone puppets, a giant eagle to hang from a classroom ceiling, prehistoric rockpools, a swarm of shadow dragons, pop-up castles

an African selection

Charges: £250 a day: includes storyteller’s fee, travel and materials. Can be paid on the day or I can invoice you. Activities can be adapted to suit groups from P1 through to Secondary

For further information and to book    

contact Gordon directly at

         creepingtoad@btinternet.com

or by telephone:

landline: 01298 77964

mobile: 07791 096857

release the storytelling pirates!

 

Sacred Land: inspiring communities

Exploring the sacred in the city

Tuesday July 7th, 2015

Bristol

 

old walls hold older stories

I have an old friendship with Martin Palmer and the team at the Alliance for Religion and Conservation. Their work is inspiring and provoking (in the best of ways) all at the same time. We have slightly over-excited meetings full of inspiration and ideas that don't always get anywhere but were good to have had anyway.

 (*I haven't got any Bristol photos to light up this post, so I'm going to add some favourite ones from other places!)

 

from holy buildings...

Here, however, we've dug a chest of treasures out of the storied sands of Bristol. We have two events in July that set out to introduce visitors to the sacred landscape of Bristol. And it is there (so forget that cynical sneer!), lying in the street patterns of the medieval city, in the precise placing of its churches, in the stories behind street names. It is even there in the overlap with Feng Shui traditions of a culture that at the time must have seemed fabulously remote

 

....to holy wells

St Anne's Well, Buxton

As well as exploring the city (the afternoon event), we want to work with participants (evening event) to think about ways of engaging people with that sense of the place: historical, spiritual, natural, built: an ecology of communities that should make somewhere special of a city. We'll talk, share ideas, consider themes that intrigue, activities that involve, traditions to cherish or to wake…join us for a rich and rewarding pair of sessions….You could book into either or both events.

For more on these events, take a look at the Sacred Land Project.

To book, please contact Pippa Moss on 01225 758004 or arcworld@arcworld.org. 

singing the wells, Buxton

July 7, 4pm to 6pm Walking Sacred Bristol, a guided tour through the ancient landscape of Bristol from a Chinese, Christian and pagan perspective. Limited places available. The walk will be led by Gordon MacLellan and Martin Palmer. Cost £12 per person. Meet at St Stephen’s Church, Old City, Bristol.

July 7, 7.30 p.m. Sacred Land: inspiring communities workshop £5 per person. St Stephen’s Church Bristol. PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A ONE OFF AND WILL NOT BE REPEATED. From medieval churches to modern chapels, Chinese dragons and the flow of qi, ancient stones to local woods, this workshop will explore ways of involving communities in their landscapes. Using case studies and sheer imagination, Sacred Land: inspiring communities will offer themes, activities and events to inspire people to look at the world around them in new ways. Mixing Christian, Chinese, pre-Christian and secular perspectives, this workshop will give participants a chance to think, plan and hopefully find new and exciting ways of drawing people into those local special places. And also simply be inspired themselves.The workshop will be led by Gordon MacLellan and Martin Palmer.

sometimes there are boggarts

• Gordon MacLellan is a storyteller (“Creeping Toad”), artist and creator of celebrations. With an international reputation, his work finds ways of helping communities explore the relationships between people, places and wildlife. His most recent book is Old Stones and Ancient Bones: Poems from the Hollow Hills. Gordon is an animist shaman following a path that draws him into relationships with landscapes – urban, wild and countryside alike – alive with the presence of spirit.
• Martin Palmer, is a theologian, author, broadcaster and environmentalist.  He is Secretary General of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (www.arcworld.org) and author of more than 20 books on religious and environmental topics such as Faith and Conservation and The Atlas of Religions. His work on sacred sites worldwide has won. He has advised UNESCO on World Heritage sites and has helped the World Monuments Fund with protecting endangered sacred sites. His book, Sacred Land (which decodes Britain’s extraordinary past through its towns, villages and countryside), is published by Piatkus/LittleBrown.

Being provoked

On reflection, this piece is full of the things I've been saying and trying to do for most of my working life, but it was good to feel them coming back to be as it were like a boomerang out of the interviews recorded with contemporary people

In Melbourne Museum

This is not a dead place. It is full of the dead but it feels like a celebration of life. From geology and fossils to invasions and the stilted culture of Victorian settlements, this is celebration. The museum is full of active, vibrant voices and the heart of the buildings is alive: a living, growing, wriggling and swimming forest. "Museum" - a house for the muses

Bunjalika , a native Australian gallery, has caught me most. There are familiar cases of less familiar objects: lives and fragments in glass boxes. There are big photos and tall carvings. Relationships with the invading/colonising Europeans have their bones laid bare, too: a grim litany of deceit, betrayal and dismissal. But, there are first person panels and films of activity: contemporary people practising or learning older skills. "I" and "we", and the text wakes up, the commentary lives, reminding us that these are not the artefacts and traditions of a lost people. There is also a great generosity in aboriginehood (? aboriginality?) that welcomes newcomers if only one grandparent, or maybe even great grandparent, came from the tribe. That is enough for you to be welcomed back in.

Voices
Most intriguing of all was a wall of faces. Almost life-size, presenting an absorbing sequence of monologues: living voices talking about culture, connection and landscape. Here, home, people and place were all woven together so that the personal, communal and political are all inevitably connected through a relationship to place. Individuals and the human communities they belong to are recognised as growing out of, being dependant upon and in turn supporting the land where they live. And out of those relationships comes the identification of issues and the need and the will to act.

Of course, I don't know if what I read, watched and heard here is representative (I would hope for it and, at the same time, be surprised if it was). It might just be Melbourne, or the state of Victoria or even just the curators of this display but these were not the voices of a defeated people or a dwindling culture. These were people advocating a different perspective on self, community and how we live within a landscape and for me they raised challenging and exciting questions about identity, especially in reflection of UK debates about regional and national identities. There is an immediate, active and graceful sense of mission here, recognising the huge length of history behind the indigenous people of this land, but moving forward, to learn and be inspired by but not to be trapped by the past.

Identity
Thinking about "being British", or Scottish, or Welsh or from Yorkshire, we often seem to talk about what we were and what we did, or who we are not (not English, not from Lancashire) while what we are seems to dissolve into a sea of generality. Maybe "being British" is to be generally vague without any vibrant distinctiveness. Are we becoming essentially bland? I can't pin this down to my satisfaction. To be "distinctive" isn't really the issue but it might be a symptom. I think I am looking for a sense of self that is rooted in celebration of ourselves: not in opposition to other people but a pride in being "of here" or "of there".

This isn't about nationalism or regional identity in overt political terms. Reading and listening to voices here, I hear a people who many counted all but dead and gone, just getting on with being, with becoming who they need to be, where that "who we need to be" is governed by their principles of people, land and culture as much as by the interaction with a wider culture and the loss of personal or community identity in the swamping presence of that other socety. Here, and I'm seeing this again with Maori principles in New Zealand, culture is seen as growing from the fusion of individual, community and place: we are who we are because of how we interact with each other and our land. I think that "land" bit is crucial( the despairing cry of environmental educators and interpreters for so many years, myself included). How we live in a place and with a place is as important to who we are as what we say and do to and with each other. Culture grows from the inspiration of place. And out of that thought comes the challenge: to find ways of reconnecting culture, people and place

Belonging
To work on a sense of place - not just to talk about it in exhibitions, books and blogs but to encourage people to find their own sense of place in where they are now. We can remember where we once were (the lost home we would return to?), and reflect on where we might be (the dream home we might never see), but most of all we need to explore the place where we are now. To map it: physically, emotionally, creatively; to find ways for people to express how they feel about "home". We need to find ways to appreciate it, to work with it, to grow into the hills and moors and streets and buildings that surround us now. To find the songs, stories and practices that express those feelings. There may be old traditions to draw upon, to reawaken or reinvent or that fusion of people, place and culture might offer new seeds for new traditions.

Challenge
We could learn from the example of the oldest human culture around today and remember that we are part of the earth we live on, we are bound to it and all that we are comes from the world around us. Connection is never broken, just sometimes forgotten. Environmental education (and interpretation?) is not a stand-alone discipline. Effective env ed will also see the individuals involved learn, grow and develop and education about environmental issues overlaps with community education, and environmental action also becomes community action and vice versa. Education to promote a sense of place then always (almost?) draws personal and community action into the same eddy. Like a spiral pattern in Maori or Celtic art, everything moves. To touch one piece of a pattern is to be drawn into the whole. To separate one section is to break the pattern

We can shake ourselves a bit, waking up again, and stand and breathe. We don't need to wait for official approval or even grant support (although that would be nice). We can just get on with becoming who we need to be to live gracefully, richly, creatively with the land we walk upon. We don't need to permission to appreciate a sense of home, to explore the fusion of "people, land and culture". We just need to do it.

Leek: once, now and next

LEEK: once, now and next

very little of the original Dieulacres is left....

 Free public activities celebrating the richness of Leek's heritage, the excitement of the town now and dreams for its future

Using the 800th anniversary of the founding of the now vanished Dieulacres Abbey to get ideas going, Leek: once, now and next sets out to encourage the people of Leek and the Staffordshire Moorlands to celebrate the richness of their heritage. I'm involved in this as one of the artists - so join us for some wild times, big drawings, fascinating talks and occasional silliness!

With a grant from Awards for All, the project offers free activities for families, youth and community groups, clubs and the general public involving everything from "design your own abbey" pop-up landscapes, to "once and future" lanterns, and a "Leek Now" Big Draw frieze. In the middle of the project there will be a "Birthday Party for a Lost Abbey" featuring Abbey Lanterns from local youth groups, music, storytelling and a giant Abbey Birthday Cake

The Lost Abbey: running through all our events is the thread of Dieulacres: Leek's Lost Abbey. For a few hundred years Dieulacres was one of the richest and most important Cistercian Abbey's in the county but with its Dissolution in the reformation almost all traces of it disappeared. A few carvings and other stoneworks  survive in the buildings of Abbey Farm, but that is all. 2014 would have been the Abbey's 800 birthday…

Organisers

Buxton-based community arts group, Stone and Water find innovative ways of celebrating the richness of the people, wildlife and landscapes of the Peak District. Recent project have included crocheting a prehistoric seabed fro the ancient seas that gave us the limestone of the White Peak and adventurous activities designed to encourage people to go "exploring with stories"

Borderland Voices aims to promote mental health through the arts and to raise public awareness and understanding of mental health issues by delivering accessible arts projects and offering creative space for self-expression within a mutually supportive community.

Public events

all events are free and no booking is required

Sunday 12th: Apple Day, visit this farm in the Upper Dove Valley for an autumn day of orchards, fruit recipes, art and stories and a chance to explore this beautiful landscape, its animals and plants

Time: 11am - 3.30pm

Where: Dove Valley Centre, Under Whitle, between Sheen and Longnor

Friday 17th: Stitching time: join our artists and add your own panel to the new Cope for the Lost Abbey. Images of ancient saints and modern heroes lie side-by-side on this community cloak. With fabric and felt, wool, silk, thread, beads and sequins: no experience is needed!

Time: 1 - 3pm

Where: Silverdale Library, Newcastle: High St, Silverdale, Newcastle ST5 6LY, 01782 297444

 

illumination workshops have been
capturing Moorlands moments

Saturday 18th: Old stories, new adventures! Join our storyteller to listen to old tales of the Moorlands: of giants and mermaids and magic and monsters! Create your own stories about life and adventures in Leek

Time 10am - 12noon

Where: Leek Library, Nicholson Institute Stockwell Street Leek. ST13 6DW

Saturday 18th: unrolling Leek! a Big Draw event, we'll be drawing all your favourite places in Leek on one huge piece of paper: from Brough Park to the Foxlowe, from William Plummer's anchor memorial to your own back garden, everywhere works!

Time: 2 - 4pm

Where: Foxlowe Art Centre, Market Place, Leek, Staffordshire ST13 6AD

Thursday  23rd, Ladydale Well, the Leek Ladder and other marvels: a talk by  archaeologist Mark Olly. A chance to meet the more mysterious side of the town, join us to think, wonder and speculate

Time: 7.30 (finishing about 9 - 9.30), refreshments provided

Where: Quaker Meeting House, Overton Bank

Leek ST13 5ES

Saturday 25th, Birthday Party for a Lost Abbey! make a small monk puppet, write a poem, listen to stories, wonder at the Abbey Lanterns, add your own visions for the future of Leek - an afternoon of activities and creativity will lead to the unveiling of the Cope and the formal cutting of the Abbey Birthday Cake

Time: 2 - 6pm

Where Foxlowe Art Centre, Market Place, Leek, Staffordshire ST13 6AD

Tuesday 28th, Ancient Adventures: To celebrate Leek's ancient history: come along and make your own medieval castle or pop up abbey – and add some tiny puppets to tell some ancient tales!

Time 10am - 12noon, 1.30 - 3pm: drop in, allow yourself 45 minutes to make something!

Where: Leek Library, Nicholson Institute Stockwell Street Leek. ST13 6DW

Wednesday 29th, Dieulacres Abbey - Leek's vanishing heritage. A talk by local historian Michael Fisher: find out about the history of Leek's lost abbey!

Time: 7.30 - 9

Where: Foxlowe Arts Centre, Market Place, Leek, Staffordshire ST13 6AD

Thursday 30th: Ancient tales, modern adventures: storytelling, story making, art: what adventures can we invent for the trees, animals and children of Brough Park?

Times: 10 -12, 1 - 3

Where: Brough Park: Vicarage Road Car Park or walk in and find us under a tree in the middle of the Park!

For more information, contact 01298 77964