New Creative and Social Workshops in Wembury
We are really excited to announce a series of creative and social workshops in partnership with Life on the Edge following our first printing workshop last month.
Creative & Social Space
Arts, crafts, walks, and poetry inspired by nature, offering mindfulness, social connection, and learning opportunities.
Fridays 10am — 12 noon at Wembury Village Hall (Knighton Room)
Friday 8 November — Walk and Poetry
Friday 15 November — Stream-dipping, meadows and bee hangs
Friday 22 November — Willow-weaving
Friday 29 November — Bug houses and seed bombs
Friday 13 December — Mosaics (tiles/sea glass)
These sessions are an opportunity to meet new people, get creative, explore how nature can improve our wellbeing, and find out more about how you can get involved in local projects.
To book your spot or for further information, please get in touch with Life on the Edge: lote@southdevon-nl.org.uk.
Life on the Edge is a 5-year project that aims to work with farmers, landowners, and the local community to make a difference for rare and endangered invertebrates on the South Devon Coast. Their vision is to give some of the UK’s most threatened invertebrates, living along the South Devon coast between Plymouth and Torbay, the space to recover and thrive; and for the people who live in and visit this beautiful landscape to feel a sense of pride and achievement in having helped to give our precious wildlife a brighter future. You can find out more about the project here.
Our first session on Friday 25 October involved experimental drawing and creating cyanotype prints, whilst finding out more about the rare and endangered species within our community. Thank you to Emma Jones for sharing your creativity and hosting such a wonderful session. Check out some of the prints below!
Our second session on Friday 8 November involved a wellbeing walk for some inspiration for poetic writing. Check our the group pieces of creative writing below and a blog post by Stuart from Life on the Edge.
“When I first met Devon Mind, I was struck by their commitment to wellbeing services, and specifically to our vision of artistic and creative ones. Having piloted our nature-centric creative workshops in Wembury, we are now partnering to deliver a programme of activities throughout Autumn.
Last week, a small but passionate group formed for a walk and poetry session. Wembury really lends itself to being inspired by nature, not least because of its location and aspect. It is seemingly designed to celebrate the natural beauty on its doorstep. We joined the incredible holloway from Ford Road straight down the hill towards Wembury Beach. The day was quiet, at ease, and pregnant with the opportunity for poetic inspiration. Clipboards and phones in hand, we actively captured the glorious sounds, smells and sights as we shared them with each other. Stopping for mindful sensory moments all the way, to talk of how the landscape spoke to us. Coming out of the woodland at the bottom of the path, the glorious church is framed proudly before us. We wended our way down through the meadow, on to the beach and then back up to the village hall via the fields. All in all, a slow 90-minute walk. In doing so, we learnt more of Wembury, had lovely moments with nature and enjoyed each other’s company. I feel sure I can speak to us all when I say we left with a gratitude for the blue tit song, the sound of the brook, the colours of the sea’s horizon and the cocoon of autumn trees.
Back indoors, the notes and ideas we’d captured became our starting point over coffee. We narrowed down our abiding features and developed each into a fully descriptive and expressive sentence. At this point, we began the collaboration, passing our sentences around, we invited others to add comments and ideas to help us enrich our words. We were clear that this was not a process of correction, but of development. We then finalised our original sentences with or without the ideas our friends had offered and cut out each sentence separately. At this point, the group was tasked with reforming those ideas into one coherent piece of writing that captures our beautiful walk. Incredibly, there were some clear themes and links in our work, but equally we realised that we’d been struck in very different ways, some by the general wonder of the nature around us, and others by the specific beauty of some moments and elements of that nature scape. This difference led us to concede to the idea of splitting our work into two poems rather than one. Inevitably, the final pieces are not perfect poetry – whatever that might be – and we did talk about the fact that we might later individually come back and edit them in our style, but what we did produce, is two short pieces of writing that definitely reflect our morning together in Wembury, and most importantly, did serve us as a focal point for many a wonderful moment and conversation about the beauty around us.
We have four more, very different, sessions planned with the group, and hope to do more in the future, so I very much look forward to the next stage of our nature-connectedness journey together. To find out more about this group, please email: lote@southdevon-nl.org.uk” — Stuart Riddle, Community Officer
Our most recent session on Friday 22 November included willow-weaving, check out the fantastic pictures below!
