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Salt Road visual arts programme at Brockhampton
In 2024, we are working in partnership with visual arts organisation Salt Road to develop a series of creative workshops and a temporary art exhibition that explores the deeper connections between ourselves and natural world.
As part of their artist-led programme ‘The Sign of the Underground’, Salt Road are running a series of public and community group workshops that explore the countless underground and underwater tendrils that connect people with natural spaces, like the meadows and orchards at Brockhampton. The work completed during these sessions will evolve into a temporary exhibition in the orchards, with interactive elements that invite visitors to creatively express their own connections with the environment.
‘The Sign of the Underground’ is an Arts Council England funded project, led by nine artists across North Herefordshire, Birmingham, and East Anglia. To find out more, visit Salt Road’s website.
Salt Road at Brockhampton
Our partnership with Salt Road began in 2023 with the We Foragers Unquiet programme. Working with visitors and urban audiences, We Foragers Unquiet encouraged participants to connect with the seasonal rhythm of Brockhampton’s traditional orchards, exploring devastating loss of foraging landscapes throughout the UK and offering a cultural response to the ecological crisis.
Elements of this work continues in ‘The Sign of the Underground’ programme, especially in the forging of new connections between urban audiences and rural landscapes. By delving deeper into the complex networks that connect us with nature, Salt Road aims to make biodiversity and an appreciation for nature a core value in all of our lives.
Public and community group workshops
Throughout the year, Salt Road are hosting a series of workshops in the orchards at Brockhampton, working with visitors to create cultural responses to the ecological crisis. Sketches, paintings, microscope studies and discussions will collectively highlight the hidden networks between, soil, fungi, roots, and human systems and communities, mapping out the underground tendrils that connect all species. By working with both National Trust visitors and urban community groups, this programme will encourage a range of response as to what our place is in nature and explore how access to green spaces impacts our understanding of ecology and the crisis that nature faces.
This year at Brockhampton, Salt Road have worked with audiences from The Birmingham Children’s Trust, The Handsworth Association of Schools, Ukrainian Support Network, and the Sandwell Youth Offending Service, all of whose ideas have fed into the final concept for a temporary exhibition in one of the orchard rooms at Brockhampton.
Exhibition
The ideas and artworks developed during the workshops will contribute towards the final exhibition pieces which will be displayed at Brockhampton from September 2024. Artworks will be exhibited in an outdoor gallery in one of the orchard rooms, with interactive elements that invite you to contribute and express your own connections to nature. There will also be a digital art film playing the Granary Kiosk, which will focus on the field microscope findings that different groups have discovered during their time at Brockhampton.
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