Wilder Arts Collective Exhibition October 2021: Touching Earth.

Wilder Arts Collective brought the ‘Touching Earth’ Exhibition to Bristol…

Wilder Arts Collective (WAC) is a group of ten arts psychotherapists and five little ones - who have met in all weathers in parks, woods and open spaces in and around Bristol. Open Space Alchemy CIC has been created by 3 of the Wilder Arts Collective members and who have drawn much of their iexperience of working outside with the Arts and Nature Therapeutically from their time within this group.

One WAC group member Jo Beedell accurately wrote as a blurb for their exhibition, ‘they say they have been mistaken for a cult, looked at askance, sheltered under various trees, often making fires, always sharing food. They add that their most meaningful sharing though, has been their image making process and the quality of acceptance and witnessing of each other’s work, which has hugely enriched their times together’.

Forest Bowl - WAC piece form EAT Retreat 2021

The Touching Earth Exhibition displayed images from a time the group shared on retreat together. During which the group engaged in their own personal process of art making and also in a group art process in which a large ‘forest bowl’ was made. Together they used clay and earth to form a large bowl on and with the earth, in a cleared space in the woods, bounded by strings and threads between the trees and encircled by ten stones.

Central to this exhibition was the interactive and public participation art piece of a large mandala that was intended to reflect the theme of Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival that honours ancestors and attributed this time of year to ‘a thinning of the veil between the living and the dead’. The Mandala created a space honouring of those loved ones no longer with us . items from nature were chosen and placed within the mandala representing or acknowledging important memories, connections and times shared. For the group they expressed and acknowledged in this piece how sharing of their hearts truths with each other over the years, had impacted and moved its members in a myriad of ways.

‘As we become invisible, untouchable to each-other in death or in absence, we still energetically move each-other, we are forever moved and impacted by each-others presence in our lives, we have never fully gone as we ripple on through those we met, knew and loved and then on through the people they go on to move in turn’.

The mandala became a stunningly beautiful myriad of nature bound up with personal and collective associations rippling out from its central light.

In addition to the Mandala was an enormous pile of Autumn leaves - a beckoning to the children and the children with in everyone to play! and also an invitation to lay still and quiet beneath the leaves, a burial or sorts, being covered entirely. An invite to acknowleged what needs to be shed, released emotionally before rising slowly or bursting up from the leaves anew.