My Wild Place: Celebrating Workington’s wind and water with Victoria Junior School

Melissa Davies

Circular forms are at the very core of My Wild Place. I approached the brief with a cyclical poem in mind, drawing on the theme of regeneration and evolution rather than decline of highstreets—after all, Workington Art Trail asks us to consider new reasons for visiting the town centre. On a site visit to the originally intended window the theme of evolution took deeper roots. Lurid green, plastic hedges marking the cafe's terrace; concrete everywhere and angles, brutal and constructed, met the immediate eye. Yet the ear was drawn by wind thunder-like as it caught the fabric of a huge hoop installed over Washington Square by a previously commissioned artist. All at once, circles and curves appeared everywhere: in the brickwork, shop branding, traffic lights, even the cheery, round tops of muffins in the cafe window. In collaboration with eight children from Victoria Junior School, I would build on what this previous artist had started.

Rocks are crumbly and flowers smell like butter

Over two days myself and the children explored their playground to investigate the word ‘wild’. Each sense came into play as they picked nature, both beautiful and ugly, from the cracks in paving slabs or the vegetable plot, the sky overhead and the damp wood of a picnic bench. The joy of working with young people is their honest and imaginative way of describing what they experience; rocks were crumbly, flowers smelt like butter and the wind ‘went through me’.

I didn’t want to force a direct reference to Workington into the children’s poem, yet even when I asked them to write from the perspective of different animals their sense of belonging to a community came through. Clearly these were young people with a connection to their environment so intertwined with human relationships and sense of place that wilderness, nature and green space are social spaces. Using the repeated phrase ‘my wild space’ and ‘my wild place’ interchangeably in every stanza of the poem while addressing their community using second person, infused the finished poem with this sense of belonging. But more than that, the poem became an invitation to notice.

With each stanza of the final poem contributed by a different child, the installation in the window picks out only a few phrases to create a new, pared down poem—a concentrated version of the children’s united voices. Likewise, the painted circle accompanying the words was a collaboration that evolved with the group. It was fascinating to see one child use a technique or paint a shape and watch as it spread appearing and reappearing at different places on the painting. The conversation as they worked was startlingly advanced, revolving around our use of time, the limits of a human life and our assumed role as guardians of nature! My Wild Place is only a glimpse into the minds of this select group of pupils.

Movement and rhythm

After working with the group I knew I wanted my own installation to address their community, as theirs does. I knew, also, that I wanted to lift words and phrases that I’d noted from conversations I’d overheard during our sessions together. Personifying wilderness by creating a character who speaks to the reader allowed me to use both the children’s words and my own seamlessly. It was yet another way of looking at nature and wilderness in the town—as something continuously flowing through. Curves and meanders, the organic shape of the Derwent river course, along with the flow of wind through Workington’s streets provided the movement and rhythm for the poem.

Now, as an artist working in public space you have to be open to the unexpected, to adapting as parameters and plans change. My Wild Place was created as a site-specific installation. Particularly my response piece, which was four poems in one, picked out with colour and scattered across four panel windows, as if by the wind from the Irish Sea.

We are all wild

Come day before the launch: plans changed. The installation site was no longer suitable and we had to find a new window to fill with wilderness and wind. New windows meant new shapes. With a smaller space and less time, I decided to return to where the whole project began: circles. The children’s poem and painting remained as it was, accompanied by a ripple painting reflecting their colours, with the river Derwent snaking across the paper. Meanwhile, the words of our character Wild took on a curving swirl, mirroring the dimensions of the children’s installation. At the heart of the coil, at the heart of the project, a simple phrase from one of the participating children, spoken here by a fictional character: We Are All Wild.

It is our hope that everyone who walks, drives or lingers by the windows at The Rebuild Site will take that idea with them, in their wild and animal core.

Thank you to the amazing team behind Workington Art Trail and Victoria Junior School. The whole experience from start to finish was utter joy and steep learning. The best kind, of course!