Environmental art sessions
Art is a powerful thing. It can connect with people of any age from any background, can be used to hold messages, and give the space and means for expression. Earlier this year we used art as a means to connect the communities of Rhyl, Prestatyn and Meliden with their landscape as part of the Well Connected project by bringing in a well-known environmental artist Tim Pugh to run art workshops.
We first ran a series of public art sessions of pebble painting in the summer holidays to carry on the legacy of the COVID pebble snakes on the Prestatyn Dyserth way and around Brickfields pond, as driven by members of the community. Three full days of pebble painting in glorious yet scorching sunshine (with a risk of storms!) in Prestatyn and Rhyl, working within government guidelines to put on some much needed public events. All sessions were full, all families had a fantastic time, and we were thanked profusely for putting on engaging sessions to occupy the kids for a while! At the time there were no other public events being put on in the area, leaving parents with the job of entertaining their kids full time. These sessions provided them with a bit of respite and importantly encouraged both the kids and parents to visit their local green spaces and form a relationship with them.
As these sessions went so well, we then went on to arrange some more general environmental art workshops with several local schools. These included Ysgol Christchurch in Rhyl, Ysgol Melyd in Meliden, and Ysgol Y Llys in Prestatyn. As schools are very restricted in what they can do at the moment, life has been quite boring for the kids with nothing exciting to look forward to. These sessions definitely gave them that! All classes from all schools were very much looking forward to these workshops, they all engaged incredibly well and really got into it. From the quiet to the most boisterous kids, all were focussed on the art and really enjoyed themselves, proving that art is one of the best ways to engage with all ages and personalities of kids. Laced within the workshops were environmental messages which will hopefully form the seed for the future care and connection with the landscape. Most of these kids don’t get the chance to visit and engage with their local natural landscape, such as the Clwydian range, beaches, nature reserves, which is a crying shame scene as they are surrounded by it and it’s so easy to access! As the future generation who will be the custodians of this landscape they need to have a connection with it and care for it.
This is what the Well Connected project aims to achieve. By engaging with your landscape through having experiences within and with it you are forming a relationship, and by doing this you are instilling a care for it. You can’t care for what you don’t know, and so within the Well Connected project through work such as this we hope to make sure that we do all know, we do all care and that we treat our landscape as part of our community.