top of page
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.17.15.png
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.12.06.png
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.17.21.png
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.11.59.png
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.17.29.png
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.12.14.png
Screen Shot 2023-09-21 at 15.17.05.png

THE COLLECTIVE

We are a loose collective of artists, writers, musicians, craft makers, growers and apiarists who are experienced in running workshops and generating community cohesiveness. Currently our network includes crafts people working in bee skep making, coppersmithing/copper inlay, corn dolly making, wood cut prints, spinning and weaving wool, bronze casting, wet felting, natural paint pigment creation, wood carving, ceramics/raku, rune making, folklore masks, storytelling, song singing and willow weaving. We also collectively work in experimenting with applying these traditional techniques to modern day waste materials with the aim to be carbon negative and to inspire people to see waste materials as a resource.

 

Of particular concern to us is the Hertiage Endangered Crafts list, which notes the traditional crafts that once were so key to English culture, that are now on the verge of dying out completely. Our circle is wide and diverse, including not just artists, beekeepers, herbalists and crafts people, but also professional growers, mycologists, coppicers, solar engineers, welders and chainsaw artists. We have the potential and knowledge to live carbon free, and our ambition is to run what we call the Apocalypse School, where we teach the pragmatics of a low carbon lifestyle. Boaters and van dwellers live a life that is much less resource hungry, and as we see it, rather than living in the past, we are in fact much better resourced and knowledgeable to live in the inevitable future. We would like to share this knowledge in a fun and inspiring manner. Growing vegetables, making humanure, roadkill cuisine, setting up solar panels and wind turbines, the school of the Apocalypse will offer a kaleidoscope of education for the new world.

 

We have the outreach experience to appeal to and approach a diverse demographic. We have all been teaching for much of our artistic careers, and have a long standing connection to various schools and community groups in the area. Instead of going into the schools to share our expertise, a practice that is on decline due to funding cuts and politically motivated disinterest in the arts, we want to take the bull by its horns, and find a place that members of the local community can come to, a place that really embodies our ethos of commons creativity. We want to start small, with a few members of our collective living on site, and owork with you to see how our impact on the local community can grow and strengthen over time.

Screen Shot 2023-07-30 at 12.27.00.png
Screen Shot 2023-07-27 at 14.08.49.png
Screen Shot 2023-07-27 at 14.09.24.png
Screen Shot 2023-07-27 at 14.09.40.png
Screen Shot 2023-07-12 at 13.28.31.png
Screen Shot 2023-07-27 at 14.08.34.png

THE COntext

The arts is in serious decline in our country. It is not just a diminshing amount of time spent engaging childhood creativity in our schools, but also a more general amnesia concerning our traditional crafts, such that many are on the verge of extinction. School reforms have seen fewer pupils taking arts GSCEs and primary school teachers lament both the deteriorating quality and quantity of provision for the arts in their syllabi. Similarly, the Heritage Craft Association now has 130 crafts on their endangered red list, with new crafts being added by the day. Crafts pass through the generations via human contact; you need to be taught by an elder. Many of the crafts on the red list are practicsed by just a handful of experts - they are therefore in danger of dying out completely with the passing of these knowledge holders.

On top of this, England is in the grip of a serious identity crisis. Brexit embodied and entrenched a divide in English society that has been growing for years. Statues are being toppled, and aggressively defended, our history is being questioned, some clamouring for apologies and reparation for imperialism, others angrily defending the good that England has done for this world. Marginalised groups are raising their voices and are being heard on a level never experienced before, and this is perceived by a large proportion as a threat to their sense of nation, and sense of self. Amid all these battles, England’s deepest wound lies forgotten. The damage caused by our historic exclusion from nature left a chasm in our sense of place and belonging, a need for an identity, that allowed nationalist ideology to pour its well-funded polyfiller into the holes.

Now more than ever, England is yearning for a sense of its own cultural identity, a relationship with the land that goes deeper than occasional recreation and makes our history and shared cultural heritage come alive again. National identity has been hijacked by anti-immigration narratives, and racist ideologies of birthright. As a collective, we believe that England needs to create, or recreate, a sense of its own identity and belonging. Instead of this definition being constructed by race or gender or political affiliation, it is created simply by the inclusive philosophy of the commons, learning and craft, interaction with the land. As a collective, we believe the answer to our political ills is also the answer to our ecological crises - a deeper connection with nature.

We are not claiming to solve England’s identity crisis. But while members of our collective are working at a national level to change policy and campaign for concepts such as Wild Service, we know we need to put this theory into practice, and manifest our work into space, and work with local communities. Arts and crafts represents a vital link with the our notion of nationhood, one that is currently almost entirely severed: first, by learning about the materials that can be harvested in the countryside, we understand our local flora and fauna better, and second, by learning the traditional techniques of our past societies, we learn about our social history. Crucially, this deeper connection can be a way into perhaps the greatest loss of our relationship with nature, the deepest core of what might be called our lost indigeneity, that of personal responsibility to its welfare, guardianship, or what we call Wild Service.

Screen Shot 2022-10-21 at 21.43.21.png
Screen Shot 2022-09-28 at 11.19.25.png

Wild Service

Some members of our collective are on the frontline of the land justice movement in the UK. One is Nick Hayes, author of the Book of Trespass, who is working with the Right to Roam campaign specifically on what they call The New English Countryside. This is a vision not just of greater rights to nature, but greater responsibility towards it. The idea is based around indigenous notions of kinship with nature, and the responsibility as the Maori tribes put it, of Kaitiakitanga, in other words, guardianship.In old England, this guardianship was wrapped up into a wider philosophy of ‘commoning’ where locals had rights to the resources of nature, just so long as they balanced these rights with responsibilities for its health and upkeep. In the modern world, guardianship of nature can be activated through citizen science apps and bioblitzing (helping to record nature and feed into a wider dataset used by scientists), through water sampling (not just for sewage and industrial run-off, but also radiation and microplastics), and through the old notion of raising the barn, coming together to work for nature and the community, maybe eliminating Himalayan Balsam from the river banks, or licenced fishing for American Signal crayfish, followed by a feast.

Our crafts centre will also contain a library of knowledge, of books and media from around the world that contribute to this understanding of Wild Service, both the history and modern day practical examples of how we might serve nature. We will aim to put on talks, both from crafts people and experts from scientific and ecological organisations that serve to both dissipate and generate knowledge on this old and radical way of interacting with nature.

Craft is the perfect vehicle for this knowledge because as its heart, it relies upon the sustainability of the natural world. There are no baskets without healthy willow trees, there is no herbalism without abundant wildflowers and weeds. Craft embodies the new relationship with nature, as it teaches a visceral understanding of the natural world, it explores the social history of our relationship with the natural world, and through the simple act of making something, it generates a personal bond. It also encourages this knowledge to come from working with your hands, the opposite of abstract learning from textbooks, the most effective way for learning to seep into the mind, the body and the soul.

Proposal

We are craftspeople and educators working separately across the south of England and we are ready to move into one space together and create something special that preserves and nurtures English culture, by connecting community with care of nature, through crafts. 

 

We are looking for a space that will be centred around an apiary of custom-built sun hives (traditional bee hives) that can offer the local community the psychological benefits of bee-keeping and also serve the local ecology with pollinators. We envision a space that can accomodate a central workshop space like a yurt or cabin, with a handful of plots for people to seasonally live in semi-permanent dwellings (ie, trucks, trailers and boats). We want our dwelling and workspace to look beautiful, to carry the atmosphere and aesthetic of the crafts field at Glastonbury, or Caravanserai at Bestival, a wonderland of imagination that doesn’t have to be packed down after five days of revelry, but in fact remains, and grows in potency.

Through workshops, events, talks and gigs, we will aim to integrate the local and wider community with the estate, so that people can forge intimate relationships with nature in a way that encourages them to take personal responsibility for its welfare. In other words, we want to teach guardianship, through craft and practice.

Our aim as a collective is to offer workshops with a staggered price range, so that more affluent members of the community can pay for the workshops with less affluent members, and in so doing, we will keep alive traditional craft practices which are currently ‘endangered’ or ‘critically endangered’ from the heritage crafts red list and to pass these skills and knowledge on to people. As stated before, we want to start small, and engage in constant dialogue with the landowner to sychronise a shared vision of how the local community can benefit from this space.

Our Aims...

1. To empower others to learn traditional craft techniques from the heritage craft endangered list. In so doing, we aim to celebrate and rejuvenate that bond we once had with the land, seeking a deeper understanding of the materials through craft and culture.

2. To create a bank of hives whose bees would contribute to the pollination of the surrounding crops and wildflowers.

3. To become a centre for education on Wild Service, ie, the work that individuals can do to safeguard and improve the health of the natural world.

4. To provide affordable living spaces for craftspeople and educators who live transiently and seasonally in England in a safe cooperative community.

5. To have the space and time to develop our own practices and experiments around the application of traditional craft techniques on waste materials.

6. Source materials from local areas and grow/process our own materials on site Be carbon negative. 

Bees

“Keeping bees has helped me in many ways, the first one was reducing my anxiety level, I started having much less anxiety attacks in comparison to previous years and it also helped me build social connections with likeminded people who care for and love nature and wildlife. It also provided me with an income enough to do what I love and believe in which allowed me to quit my job in the luxury fashion industry where I was unhappy and felt that I had no purpose to live.” Ali Alzein, founder of Bees & Refugees

One of our members, Lily Hardy, is passionate about making beekeeping accessible to low income households and has been designing beehives made using waste materials. As well as caring for 300 national hives for pollination, she has also learnt a lot about bee-centred beekeeping methods where you focus more on the needs of the bee rather than the beekeeper and create hives that are less intrusive and therefore less stress for both the bees and the beekeeper. A non-intrusive hive does not mean that you cannot check your hives for disease or properly care for your bees, it just allows the bees to construct the hive more alligned to their natural instinct than the keepers ease of honey extraction. A bee-centred apiary is about living in harmony with bees and receiving honey only when the hive can afford it.

Lily makes ‘sun hives’ using traditional home grown skep straw, bicycle inner tube, tyres, scrap wood, foraged nettle fibre and is always seeking to develop more designs and test out different waste materials and foraged fibres. Our apiary would consist of many different types of hives and act also as a sort of research centre on different hives and their pros/cons, how the bees respond to different materials etc.

We also plan to look more into the effects of apitherapy which is being used in some countries to treat multiple sclerosis and lymes disease. We know that beekeeping improves mental health, it has even been researched and suggested that beekeepers have a higher life expectancy. Tending to hives is gentle and mesmerising, and honey is a wonderful antibiotic, antidepressant, it helps memory and heals the skin.

We would run a community group on tending to the hives where locals would be allowed access to the apiary when inducted into caring properly to the hives. They would then have access to apitherapy and bee products like honey and propolis. Any leftover honey would be sold or made into mead and then sold at local markets. We would also run workshops on making a bee-skep or bee-hives or sell individual hives. We also make educational beekeeping materials in the form of posters or booklets.

bottom of page