Melissa explains how she co-created the poem with Victoria Junior School.

My Wild Place began to take shape from the first visit to Risman Place in Workington town centre. Concrete dominates; angles and corners; short, sharp phrases and slogans remove flow of energy from the space. But when you stop and look, circles begin to appear….above your head, between buildings, under foot and eventually curves sneak into your vision. This effect is what I aimed to capture using a combination of poetry and painting.

‘Where do you go to find the wild in your town?’ is the question we settled on: a challenge to the eight participating children—could they see their semi-urban landscape in a new way? Could they look for long enough that they begin to see pockets of wild in between bollards and shop fronts? What do they want to say to their community to help others spot the curves, the organic and the wild when they visit the town centre? The emphasis of this project is co-creation so I simply provided the initial prompt and only after the children had spent time exploring where the wild existed in their own school yard. A beautiful but unplanned thread came from the school’s focus on well-being at the time the workshops were held so naturally the value of time outside, time in nature and in fact time itself began to weave into the poem.

True co-creation means all artists inform the final outcome. The passing of time came through in the work of several children so, in tandem with drawing attention to circles in Risman Place, a cyclical poem was the obvious choice. Each child has written one verse of the poem, all incorporating the title line ‘My Wild Place’ or the variation ‘My Wild Space’ The result is a piece which can be read in any direction or started at any point. With each different start point, the emphasis is slightly different and another child’s voice rings louder.

In order to bring my own voice into the work in a way that enhanced theirs I added an ‘echo’ which not only repeats the colours the children painted but also their words. ‘My Wild Place’ isn’t just a co-creation by eight children, it’s a co-creation between two generations; between members from within and without Workington and between voices new and experienced in poetry. This installation is, like wilderness in Workington, made up of many layers!

Melissa introduces her own artistic response.

As an artist working within the community, it’s unusual to be invited to create a conceptual piece of your own so the opportunity, not only to co-create, but to respond to the experience brought a personal engagement to the process. I approached Workington Art Trail as someone who grew up on Cumbria’s west coast, not only as a guide for the group’s ideas.

When I think of wild in Workington two elements come immediately to mind: the river Derwent and the wind. Wind featured repeatedly in the children’s work so quickly it became the uniting force for the whole installation. Not only did we reference wind in the poems but the words appear to be blown across the café windows, like leaves. The fictional character of Wild whose voice we hear in my poem embodies this wind; he travels on it and is made of it. He invites us to surrender to the breeze and see where it takes us. Meanwhile, the river flows in the shape of the work, is painted in the echo to the children’s work and it provides momentum to counter the straight lines and concrete corners of the urban setting.

After spending time exploring urban wilderness alongside the group, I wanted to bring their perspective to the character of Wild. The details they picked out like dandelions, the crumbling stone and insects are as wild as giraffes or elephants on the Serengeti—this is the core of both works. The character of Wild is simply our guide, it offers us moments to pause and breathe if we listen out for its voice.

In the spirit of layering and having fun with what a poem ‘should’ be, I decided to wrap tiny, individual poems into the complete piece. By picking these out with colour even someone who rushes past without taking time to read the whole will subconsciously pick out a complete—if brief—poem. It’s up to the reader to decide which (or how) they read and in what order!