Day of Access is a collaborative project considering place-awareness, access to nature, healing, illness and wounded nature. Conceived by Alec Finlay, it has been developed with Lapidus, the Travelling Gallery and a wide range of other partners from the fields of environment, the arts and wellbeing*. It takes place over a two-year period, July 2019–July 2021, and involves a travelling exhibition, workshops and events, a website and a publication.
As one strand of the project, we have devised a menu of workshops facilitated by the poet Ken Cockburn, exploring place-awareness and disability perspectives. Each workshop will be tailored to a specific location. Our intention is to share simple activities and writing forms that enrich our relationship to nature. These include mapping place-names and their meanings, making short walks and slow walks, surveying local views, exploring local flora and fauna, and discussing access to nature in the widest sense, with an emphasis on healing. We hope these activities will extend participants’ sense of belonging, enabling them to consider how our experience of nature can be healing at a personal level, and to respond to the wider issues of wounded nature – the crises of climate breakdown, habitat loss, and toxic pollution.
Currently we are looking to organise workshops between October 2019 and July 2020. A workshop can be organised as a stand-alone event, or linked with a visit from the Travelling Gallery. An exhibition by Alec Finlay hosted by Travelling Gallery is touring Scotland from August to December, sharing work relating to these ideas. If you would like further details of the Travelling Gallery’s schedule, or are interested in booking it for your organisation, please let us know and we will send details.
Workshops are suitable for between 4 and 20 participants. The workshop will take place out of doors unless the weather is against this. The ideal venue is an outdoor space (garden, park, woodland, wild space), with access to an indoor meeting space.
We are currently preparing a bid for funding to the Heritage Lottery Fund, which will enable us to subsidise the costs of workshops. Depending on the outcome of the bid and the level of interest expressed, we may be able to offer some workshops free of charge. We are also offering workshops at an unsubsidised rate.
If you are interested, please let us know and tell us
- of a suitable location where the workshop could take place
- roughly when you would like a workshop
- if you are able to pay the full costs of a workshop (£400), require a subsidy (£200), or could only take a workshop if there was no cost to you, your group or organisation.
It would also help us to have a very brief statement of why you’d like to take part, as this will help us in terms of persuading funders.
If you have any questions, or would like to express interest in a workshop, please email Alec Finlay at alecfinlay@yahoo.com.
Day of Access
