Local artists would like to know your favourite Wychwood places

Do you have a favourite place, soundscape, view, or path in the Wychwood area? We would love to know what it is, and what makes it special to you. In collaboration with our Artists

in Residence, Nimmi Naidoo and Flora Gregory, we are launching an artistic project to understand what makes the Wychwood special to the people who live there. We would like to invite anyone living in the Wychwood area to share photos, videos, poems or artworks reflecting the places they love in the Wychwood Forest, to support an innovative virtual artwork that explores how we see the environment around us.

Flora and Nimmi, known as the Mappists, create participatory art events that offer people different ways of connecting with nature. Recent events include 'Come into the Woods: Topples Wood' an opportunity for forest bathing and to connect to the woods through audio works, and 'The Map Room: Make your Mark!' where people mark the route of their Wychwood Forest walks on a map and talk about what they love about being in the forest. Flora and Nimmi both gained an MA in Social Sculpture at Oxford Brookes University. Social Sculpture is an art form that employs social processes, and puts forward the idea that we are all artists in that every aspect of life can be seen as creative. In this project, the artists will gather together contributions that celebrate what locals find special about the Wychwood around us. They hope to create a new map, and possibly a map app, of the Wychwood area that collects and displays personal responses to places. As contributions come in, they will also share them on their website—and we will share contributions on our Instagram channel—to help us all discover new and meaningful places in the space around us. So if a favourite place, tree, or anything else springs to mind, please do get in touch. We welcome contributions of photos, poems, recordings, drawings, or anything else representing your favourite places in the Wychwood, along with a couple of lines explaining what makes it special to you. We hope you enjoy the project, and that it helps us all find fresh perspectives on the natural world around us, for lockdown and beyond.