Deep Encounters Artists

Zoë Ashbrook

Never a destination but rather a passing point as part of longer walks, this small patch of woodland landscape, nestled on the steep incline close to the top of Chosen Hill, has repeatedly captured my attention. For many years I’ve walked along the fringes, often pausing to photograph the seasonally dominant plant life and sculptural skeletal remains of entangled ivy overgrowth, decaying tree stumps and long fallen branches now home to dense mounds of lush moss, gloriously coloured lichen and trailing foliage. With no footpaths this is not a space that makes closer investigation easy. A man made boundary line separates it from the wider woodland and encircle the site; a narrow road on one side and connecting footpath track along the other creating a route of approximately 565 paces. I’ve wondered what lies much deeper within this space which forms part of a much wider ancient woodland and site of historical significance.

Chosen Hill is a site rich with a history of human influence. Adjacent to my enclosed area lies remains of an Iron Age Hillfort now buried beneath reservoirs. Parts of St. Bartholomew’s Church date back to 12th Century and Roman steps close by. The temporality of these ancient histories and close proximity makes the woodland space I plan to explore all the more appealing to investigate. I will continue to research the history of the site alongside creative explorations through walking, drawing, collecting, documenting and making.

Ruth Broadbent

Drawn to a glimmer of water hidden in a small hollow of a log, I walked closer and looked inside. I’ve walked past this log many times, in a small hilltop woodland of the castle park grounds, but have never stopped to sit on it. I usually sit on a large tree stump at the bottom of the hill, nearer to the river and moat. Something pulled me closer this time, and I wanted to return. I took my lunch and sat on it, walked around it, peered into gaps, noted lichen marks, fungi and the aptly placed score lines around the centre of it.

I mapped the rainwater puddle sheltered in a hollowed out section near the top of the trunk and will continue recording rainfall over the year: a miniature puddle world. Layered together, over time, their edges might have resonances with the tree rings at the base (a whole other world to discover). This patch of woodland is open enough to let in sun, rain and moonlight; their trace marks becoming part of the log. The cut off branches add undulations to the long line of the trunk. With time, I’ll no doubt find sounds and movement in its solid stillness as new life grows on and from it. Walking slowly beside it, left foot heel touching right foot toe, the log (including tree stump and visible root base) is 84 lengths of my foot long, 6 footlengths high (highest part from ground), 4 wide at top and 14 wide at base. It has a metal id tag near its base, 00622.

Alison Berrett

I have been walking down this narrow path alongside the field I regularly walk my dog in, for many years. It is the way I choose to access the field even though there is an easier opening I could go through. During the time I have been walking this path, I have taken hundreds of photos, often in the early morning as there seems to be a particularly enchanting way the light scatters through the trees onto the undergrowth, creating dramatic shafts and contrasts. I have noticed the way it changes across the seasons and in different weather. In Autumn for example, there is a beautiful spindle berry bush that shows off its orange and pink flowers. I observe the mosses changing, the leaves on the trees new and fresh in the spring and then rich browns and yellows on the earth beneath my feet in November.

I am so pleased to have a place to share this as part of the Deep Encounters project. I will be taking photos, short videos, writing prose and poems and making drawings. This will also contribute to the DYCP Arts Council funded project I am currently creating, which is focusing on explorations of the origins of my love for the landscape and natural world.

Sara Dudman

A small community apple orchard forms part of our village green, opposite my house. It is a very familiar and well-loved dimension of our village and as such, I am fascinated to get under the skin of it. I would like to understand it in its ecological entirety. I will seek out and reinterpret the ecological relationships within this small, managed patch of land. Rather than measuring, weighing or researching the facts about this place, I want to become a deeper part of it.

I am lured by the uncertainty of discovering new insights and surprises found in a place already known. Walking with new eyes in early December 2025, I noticed the remains of a dead crow and just how many apples remain on the ground after this year’s bountiful harvest. 20 of us gathered to pick the apples in October to press to make juice and cider. The remaining apples continue to nourish the crows. Our community sowed wildflower seeds across the meadow in 2023. We have been monitoring the increase in pollinators attracted by the flowers. More people inhabit and enjoy the Green since the flowers have arrived. Do our shifting relationships and behaviour in response to the man-made changes to this patch of land correspond with those of our more-than-human community? I will invite members of the community to share my journey, collaborate and help to dig deeper into this place.

Tamsin Grainger

There is a patch of woodland in the municipal park near my house where I will be walking regularly. It is in the middle of a residential area, overlooked by many tenement flats, and the trees in it have a view of the sea. To one side there is a newer coppice with smaller trees planted by the community. Surrounded by grass and a playpark, it is well-used but not always respected, with a great deal of rubbish ending up there, one way or another. There have been burnings, graffiti and other damage done. There is a great variety of trees and other undergrowth, and I’m guessing that birds inhabit it and animals visit.

Although I have spent some time at Granton Crescent Park in the past, my aim is to continue to show it some appreciation – after all, it is the closest I get to countryside here in the city. Paying attention to somewhere changes me and it may even be that I change it, although I would not seek to interfere. I will get to know the place further – listening, watching, touching, smelling and even tasting. The landscape and I will be in a more continuous relationship, and who knows what will arise. It will be interesting to see what artwork comes through as the seasons turn and we get used to each other.

Melinda Hunt

My creative practice uses walking and drawing (simultaneously) to capture what I see and hear and feel while traversing a site on foot. I am a human seismograph, receiving and transferring data from site to paper. Walking and drawing help me to be present and receptive, to resist fragmented, distracted thinking and wasted time.

For the Deep Encounters project, I have selected Pride Square, a public space several hundred meters from my home in Newtown in Sydney’s Inner Western suburbs. Renamed in 2022, Pride Square and the adjoining Pride Centre celebrate the diversity of our LGBTQIA+ community. Local residents and visitors pass through the Square, going to and from the train station, bus stops, and the shops. The Square is also frequented by buskers, services providing food for people in need, teams of fund-raisers hoping for donations for charities and people hoping for donations to sustain themselves. There are political protests in the Square with crowds carrying banners and shouting into megaphones. The Police and Fire Brigade vehicles pass through the Square, often with lights and sirens, on their way to King Street. Many people just take a seat in the sun to watch the world go by, from early in the morning until late at night, relaxing and talking to others with time to spare. Pride Square will present an abundance of creative potential for a walking artist. I look forward to participating in the Deep Encounters project.

Richard Keating

“Life is lived in a zone in which earthly substances and aerial media are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, participate in weaving the textures of the land. Here, organisms figure not as externally bounded entities but as bundles of interwoven lines of growth and movement, together constituting a meshwork in fluid space. The environment, then, comprises not the surroundings of the organism but a zone of entanglement.” – Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World. Tim Ingold, 2008.

“Well, a few minutes ago I thought that the dancers were expressing something about the night and the town and the moon, that they were sort of saying what those things would say if they could dance. But perhaps the night and the town and the moon were saying things, and using dancers to say it.” – The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three. Philip Pullman, 2025

As part of WtL’s ‘Deep Encounters’ project, my focus will be on using art practices to reveal and increase potential “entanglements” in Norton Wood Community Orchard, facilitating conversation and co-creation between the human and non-human orchard communities. This will be achieved by continued cross-disciplinary working with the existing orchard group and Nailsworth Town Council, including developing the work started by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust’s ‘bioblitz’ and collaborating with the embryonic Nature in Nailsworth group.

Janette Kerr

Drop downhill into a valley and there’s a small wood with a tiny stream running through it. Hidden amongst the trees lies an inconspicuous pond, surrounded by brambles and saplings. A trickle of water feeding it can just be seen under the foliage. I’ve chosen this place because it’s somewhere little visited and often unnoticed. It has its own boundaries of raised banks enclosing it; walking around it takes less than 5 minutes, despite struggling to extricating myself from brambles and stinging nettles, ducking under tree branches, and wading through deep sucking mud.

Once used by a mine, historical maps (1840s tithe map and 1880s OS 6 inch 1st edition), show buildings of which nothing now remains. It seems that the pond was once larger; presumably it’s become silted up since the trees were planted or perhaps they just arrived there as seeds blown by the wind, and grew.

I intend to visit the pond throughout the year, note changes, discover what lies beneath the surface by pond dipping, measure changing water heights, identify plants growing around and in the water. Hidden from a nearby footpath by the surrounding trees, I will sit and observe, draw, paint, and photograph, listen and record sounds, and play. I will see what happens….. allowing the project to evolve slowly.

Rachel McDonnell

My chosen place is a patch of land in Glenarm, Co. Antrim, a river, a bit on either side (one a temperate rainforest type bit of woodland which is an Ulster Wildlife Trust reserve, one pasture), and a bridge crossing the river on one side of the patch I’ve chosen.  It used to be part of a Deer Park, so both sides of the river started out from the same place, but what has been done since has left them as very different places.

It’s where my Dad was from, about 15 minutes walk from his house, which is visible on the top right of the map of my walk, and is somewhere I spent a lot of time when I was young.  We used to have picnics in the woods, and I’ve done the same with my kids.  I’ve been wanting to do some work there for a very long time, and as I’m going to be coming and going quite a bit in the coming year as my Dad left me his house, which needs quite a lot of attention, I thought this might be the moment to make a start.  There’s so much going on in the woods and around, it’s hard to know where to begin, so the commitment to someone other than myself is probably the only way I’ll get going. I am hugely looking forward to getting to know the place in a different way.

Valerie Coffin Price

Cog Lane, Llandochau Fach, Glamorgan. I have been walking this old green lane for the past 27 years. It is the way I walk to the station, the local supermarket, for short daily strolls and en route to longer walks along the river Ely. Its route used to take traffic down from the high road through Llandochau Fach, or Llandough-juxta-Penarth, down to the old crossing point over the river Ely, originally a ferry.

During lockdown it served as the main artery to longer walks, and for more intimatestudies of my immediate environment. For the past year, after a knee injury, it has been my daily walk: I have monitored my recovery by marking the distance I am able to walk, noting small differences in the weather, the path underfoot, changes in the seasons and the puddles that form.

I intend to use work produced over the last year, as well as maps, drawings and the
myriad photos and studies from the past 25+ years, as part of the project. 51˚ 27’ 3” N 3˚ 11’ 50” W

Amanda Steer

The Deep Encounters project, for me, is an opportunity to have a year long engagement with a small piece of land, land that I often walk through; where multiple footpaths meet, and man made interventions have clearly taken place amongst the natural environment.  By returning to the same site repeatedly across the seasons, I seek to cultivate a deep, attentive encounter that allows slowness, care, and reciprocity. The work, I hope, will emerge through acts of walking, observing, listening, mapping and making, allowing the land to reveal itself gradually through subtle changes in its inhabitants, growth, decay, weather, and human presence.

The land will be an active collaborator, with time and attentiveness being crucial, creative methodological acts, to experience the rhythm of the land, equally through times of abundance and dormancy.  I hope to meet others, in this space, to find out more about this unassuming pocket of land, its past and its future. Ultimately, this co-project is an exploration of how repeated, embodied encounters can foster intimacy, and connection with place. It asks how artistic practice might function as a form of ecological listening, creating space for connection, responsibility, and care within a specific, modest terrain.

Sally Stenton

I walked in search of a narrow, wooded place between river on one side and footpath and field on the other.  The path I thought I remembered from lockdown walks had gone, but I found another incursion and broke brittle hawthorn twigs and pushed aside thick thorny bramble stems to gain access to a small piece of land carpeted with ivy and leaves about 4 x 4 metres of gentle slope and infinite in its height and depth. It is an inhospitable place for humans. It scratches lines on me and steals my hat, and yet there is a cosiness to the prickly space where soft focus images of the thorns resemble nipples! In a few months I expect to move to another part of the country and will search for small piece of land that resonates in some way with this one. The layering of place will form a connection between here and there, then and now.  The space does not allow me to traverse the boundary and so I take photos in 4 horizontal directions and above and below. From these images and the use of a cardboard box to hold them, I created a 3d collage. The map has taken the form of a vessel.

Molly Wagner

Deep Encounters is an opportunity for me to develop my project, The Shape of a Walk. The shape grew from my regular (ongoing) walks and runs from home, along residential streets to, into, and around Sydney Park and back again. I’ve been walking and running versions of this route for many years. As I became more interested in Walking Art I began tracing my route on maps. The shape in the drawings and painting evolved from these tracings. I enjoy the combination, both during the walk and in the visual representation, of the rectangular shape of the streets with the organic shape made by the paths in Sydney Park. The first iterations of this work were exhibited in 2019 and 2021 as an abstract painting, the shape of the walk drawn on two maps of two differing scales and as a walking prompt.

In 2020-21 I experimented with different ways of drawing my walks and runs. I used maps, tracing paper and Strava. However, I was unable to resolve how to exhibit these drawings in an exhibition. In 2024 I was invited by another artist to collaborate on walking art project during which I made videos of this walk. The videos and photographs also remain an unresolved creative exploration of this area. It is my hope that the Deep Encounters collaboration will provide a framework that allows me to develop and articulate my creative responses to the lands, waterways, ‘creatures great and small,’ structures of this self-defined, familiar shape.