Places & Traces is part of my Cultures of Care project. Part of Cultures of Care is care of nature and landscape, place and belonging. I’ve been working for a year now with a wellness in nature group and wanted to build on what I’ve learned in that residency to create something more focussed on place. I live on the edge of Charnwood Forest, an extraordinary but often overlooked landscape. I was born here too and have a deep-rooted sense of belonging in this place and a long history of exploring here. I’ve been exploring this emotional connection to place for a long time, on and off, but really this idea of creating a project embedded in my local landscape came from my artist friend Kathryn Parsons. She’s created her own creative research residency local to her exploring the lost Westings Meadow. I find her research and creative practice around it very inspiring and when she suggested I could create a research residency of my own, I immediately realised I wanted to work with Charnwood Forest, which I love so much and can access so easily from my home. I’ve chosen to focus on part of the Forest which is nearest my home and walkable from the edge of Loughborough.
Through funding from Charnwood Geopark I’ve been able to open up my research residency to work with local people who also have a connection and emotional engagement with this landscape. Over the next 9 months we will share walks and wild workshops and create emotional maps of the landscape. In the winter we’ll move indoors to work with maps and archives and in the new year we’ll work with artist Hannah Moreton to create a tactile, emotional paper and textile map.
Participation is free and anyone who lives in Charnwood or visits often is welcome to join in. There’s a lot more information about this on the project main page here and there are other blog posts linked below.
Places & Traces of Charnwood Forest
Places & Traces is a creative landscape history project looking at how local people experience and feel about the Charnwood Forest area. Over the next year I’m hosting creative exploratory walks and wild workshops where we will explore what makes this area so special to us personally. I’m collecting community stories and experiences of this…
When public engagement is not very engaging
This morning I gave up two hours to go to a nature recovery strategy residents consultation workshop. I left feeling deeply frustrated by the lack of clarity on the strategy and what input we could have and by the poor way it was run. It’s reminded me just how valuable public engagement skills are and…
Lines and Places
Landscape history and artist practice After a hedge-hiatus early this year for my Blossom & Thorn project, I’m back to my previous landscape project. I’m slowly walking all of the paths in a 10 square mile-ish area near my home and looking for interesting things like old boundaries, ancient woodlands, good hedges, ridge and furrow…
Ruth Singer 
Let me know what you think