Communicating Biodiversity Creatively

In November 2010 I went on a workshop organised by Wildwise about communicating biodiversity creatively. The workshop was facilitated by an artist who has a lot of experience working in nature with children and community groups.

We spent the first half of the day outdoors at the beautiful Sharpham Trust learning about different ways groups can experience biodiversity. This included an exercise which involved collecting natural objects and making a map or message communicating something you’d like to say to a particular animal, which I think in this case were mice.

We then went back indoors for the remainder of the day to create an image about what we’d experienced in a medium of our choice. The slightly blurry image below shows a fabric painting of a bird, a seed head and a hand.

Personal learnings from the day included reminders that not all maps have to be made on paper, and that many subjects have to be experienced in context before they can be communicated. Our verbal language does not stretch far enough to fully communicate something as complex as our relationship with nature, but art and lived experience can go some of the distance towards helping us define and feel what these things mean to us.