This year due to the Covid-19 pandemic we were sadly unable to host our Wild Child Festival so we are running a special digital art exhibition on Wednesday 26th August instead to celebrate art and nature.

Read the blog updates below to hear about the work that went into creating the digital art exhibition. We will also be hosting the digital art exhibition on this page so be sure to check it out!

This August Staffordshire Wildlife Trust are celebrating art and nature with a special digital WildArt Exhibition on the 26th August 2020. The artwork will be displayed on our Wildchild Festival blog (this page) and we will also be taking over the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust family activities Facebook page for the day with exciting insights into the artwork.

These sculptures are a celebration of the wildlife that our young visitors have seen whilst walking around The Wolseley Centre. 

In order to create these fantastic sculptures Rob first used Facebook to encourage visitors to The Wolseley Centre to draw wildlife that they had seen whilst there and share these drawings with us. He then headed to his workshop and transformed the drawings into large scale sculptures, an almost exact replica of the drawings contributed by our visitors. 

At the festival these sculptures will be placed around the grounds of The Wolseley Centre so you can walk amongst the wildlife. Can you spot any animals that you have seen? Or did one of your drawings get made into a sculpture?

These flags document and celebrate the wildlife that young people have seen whilst exploring their local natural spaces during lockdown. 

To create the artwork Gwenllian has worked with a local Beaver group via post to inspire and encourage them to adventure in their local wild spaces and document the wildlife that they have seen there. They have turned their explorations into drawings that have been expertly printed onto large festival flags.

These Beavers are helping us to wave the flag for local wildlife, highlighting the exciting creatures we have on our doorstep. The flags will also look fabulous at the festival waving in the wind.

This audio nature journal serves as a record of experiences young people have had with nature during lockdown. 

Louise invited young people to record themselves completing the sentence ‘Once upon a time I saw…’ and sending it in to be made into a piece of audio artwork. The idea was to highlight how nature is all around us, even if we are restricted to looking out of our window. Nature can be found on windowsills, in patios or in a small patch of soil. 

This artwork will take the form of a podcast that can be shared online or downloaded and listened to while taking a walk around The Wolseley Centre during the festival.

A note from the artist, Louise Bland ;

"Tell me the nature you see and be a wild child.

From tiny ants crawling, to huge sweeping birds in the sky, nature, the world around us, is full of wonder. Whilst children couldn’t make it to the Wildlife Trust sites we asked them to be wildlife’s observers and send in their thoughts and feelings about the nature they saw during lockdown as audio files. We have created a unique, audio soundscape from these thoughts. Sit back and take a listen to hear how important nature has been to children during lockdown.

Listen on your computer or with headphones for best sound experience!"

Click here to listen to the audio artwork 

Staffordshire Wildlife Trust created with young people aged 16-25 a new art project funded by Arts Council England. Working alongside Artist Niki Colclough, the group produced digital artwork that formed part of the online Wild Art exhibition 2020 and eventually will be on display at the Wildchild Festival 2021. 

The young people who responded to an open call for participants are interested in the environment, specifically, in exploring our human relationship with the environment. 

For all of those involved in the project, this was an opportunity to learn new art skills, meet other people and make a difference to the way people might think about, and support their local environment.

The group meet weekly between mid June - August 2020. 

You can see some of the participating artists work below

1st video - a summary of the project 

2nd Video credit; Thomas Harvey

3rd Video credit; Naomi

With funding from the Arts Council England Rob Turner has been commissioned by Staffordshire Wildlife Trust to create Wildlife Sculptures that will form part of our exciting online WildArt Exhibition in August, the artwork will also be installed at the Wildchild Festival next year. 

Rob invited young people who have visited The Wolseley Centre to share drawings of the wildlife they had seen whilst observing nature on our site. We received lots of exciting drawings and in the images below you can see that they are starting to come to life as giant sculptures. 

We hope you are as excited as we are to see the final piece later this month.

We are still enjoying our weekly Cloudpiece project meetings; coming together online to talk about our thoughts on environmental issues we care about. Niki has been setting us weekly tasks- last week we followed this Soundcloud walk in our local area and took photographs of things that interested us - 

https://soundcloud.com/user-348637751

The walk gave us a new way to connect with our local environments, a reason to get out of the house and be creative, we also liked looking at things differently and noticing more beauty in the everyday. This week we made collages with materials found around home - and then discussed what we had made together. We talked about human relationships to nature and ‘nature wins’ - a name given to those sprigs of nature we see poking out of man-made places.

Our collages also sparked a conversation about how we talk about environmental issues in a way that is helpful, not condescending. These ideas will now start to shape our collaborative artwork.

Our fourth and final commission for the festival will be starting this month, Artist Gwenllian Spink will be working with local guide groups to create some festival flags to be displayed at the festival. 

The guides will be issued art packs that they can use to go out and explore their local natural spaces and use this as inspiration to create artwork. The mages that they create will be printed onto recycled polyester to make large flags.

We are beginning the Cloud Piece project by spending some time connecting with our local environments, this has meant using our senses to enjoy the nature that is local to us - either a garden, or doorstep green space. In week 1, we explored sound maps. We were asked to spend a few minutes indoors and then a few minutes outside, to notice the difference, then we had the choice to draw or write the sounds we could hear.

When we did this exercise, we noticed how calming the outside space was, how the weather can affect our mood and how much there was to listen to.

If you would like to have a go at making a sound map, there is a good instructional video here 

We were asked to make a piece of art, either physical or digital, to represent our experience, we could use representational drawings, abstract drawings or words. 

Here is India’s example made with text - she listened to the sounds around her and typed them into this document, before arranging them into a pattern.

We are on the search for drawings of nature that you have seen at our Wolseley Centre 

We would like representative (we don’t have elephants, tigers or sharks!), naïve, fantastical or realistic– bold, striking and eye-catching drawings by anyone aged up to 16 years

-Birds

-Animals

-Fish

-Plants

-Insects

Artist Rob Turner will reproduce a selection of the drawings and transform them into large scale sculpture-like cut outs. The giant drawings will be made into an art installation as part of our Wildchild Festival, funded by Arts Council England.

We don't yet know when the festival will be but we are working with artists to ensure that when it does happen it is the best that it can be!

Send your drawings to: wildchildfestival@staffs-wildlife.org.uk

Staffordshire Wildlife Trust are currently working with young people aged 16-25, to create a new art project funded by Arts Council England. Working alongside Artist Niki Colclough, the group will create a digital artwork that will be shown as part of an online art exhibition in 2020 and eventually at the Wildchild Festival 2021. 

We are working with young people who responded to an open call for participants, they are interested in the environment, specifically, in exploring our human relationship with the environment. 

For all of us this  is an opportunity to learn new art skills, meet other people and make a difference to the way people might think about, and support their local environment.

 The group is meeting weekly (using an online platform) between mid June - August 2020. Keep an eye on our blog for updates on how the project is progressing.

If your children are aged between 6-12 years we want to hear from you as part of a special art project!

This audio project is the perfect excuse to get outside, embrace nature and go exploring with your kids

Get involved and send your sound recordings to wildchildfestival@staffs-wildlife.org.uk Please note that recordings should be under 60secs. 

Click on the Instruction sheet and watch the video below to find out more!