This spring and summer our team of local artists are working with people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds to provide the opportunity for them respond to our Shropshire heritage and landscape through artworks, words, sounds and video. The project, funded by the Heritage Lottery, is called Hey! Earthlings!

Hey! Earthlings! has been busy with walks and workshops since May, and originally focused on Old Oswestry Hillfort. Our exhibition, ‘The Hey! Earthlings! Cabinet’, was on display in the Gateway Centre, Chester St, Shrewsbury during July. The Hey! Earthlings! Cabinet showed works created in Oswestry by different groups of asylum seekers, people newly arrived in Shropshire, and groups with a shared cultural connection.

The project has now moved to Shrewsbury and has just provided a workshop for new participants that took place on Doctor’s Field, beside the River Severn. On a very hot day the artists, community workers and participants walked down the long steps into Doctor’s Field to enjoy activities. We explained the name of the project, how we are all Earthlings, of the earth, dependent upon it. And we talked about the legacy of Charles Darwin, born in his family home of The Mount, above Doctor’s Field, and who walked these paths. Then we listened through headphones to a microphone set in the River Severn. Then heard the small, strange sounds that come from the inside of a willow tree. The Field, probably named long ago for its medicinal herbs, was covered in this dry August with crab apples, hawthorn berries, sloes – and drifting thistledown.

With the artists and community workers the group, which included children, played parachute games and shared stories and languages. There were opportunities to use a Polaroid camera and an iPad, and to make short films, collaborative poems and sound recordings.

IN DOCTOR’S FIELD WHERE

we listen to the river.
Sometimes, you can hear fish.

We listen to the willow tree,
its dry moss crackle.

Our journey sticks are magic wands,
make knapweed like night owls,
browned and fluffed and perching.

We’re going as much backwards
as forwards.

We wish on thistledown,
held in our hands,
blown into the future.

After lunch, participants enjoyed an art workshop, editing their films and making cyanotype prints, tiny books and collages. It was another Hey! Earthlings! day, full of goodwill, playfulness, laughter, and trust.