woven places
Fforest Fawr Geopark needed a creative partner to design and deliver a community engagement event that would deepen people's relationship with its geology and landscape, one that went beyond interpretation panels and guided walks.
Client: unesco geoparks
cultural heritage
oral histories
participatory arts
community curation
What we did
Working with partners including Brecon Beacons Tourism and the Joseph Herman Foundation, we designed a programme built around a series of guided landscape walks led by a Geopark geologist, woven together with a hands-on making practice and a culminating community exhibition at Ystradgynlais Welfare. The methodology was deliberately slow and tactile: we wanted people to encounter the landscape through their hands, not just their eyes.
Participants were invited out onto the landscape with a geologist who could read the ground beneath their feet: the ancient seabeds, the glacial scourings, the stories held in the rock. As they walked, they were given small weaving frames and asked to do two things: find words for what they were experiencing and collect fragments from the landscape around them (grasses, feathers, bark, moss). These were woven into the frames as they went, becoming small, intricate records of a particular walk, a particular moment. Back at the Welfare, those individual pieces were gathered into a curated exhibition. The public were invited not just to look but to contribute, adding their own threads to large collaborative woven works that grew over the course of the event. A film woven from community photography and found sound from the walk series played alongside, and all the final artworks were presented to Fforest Fawr Geopark for permanent public display.
The difference it made
Woven Places produced art made by the community that a public institution wanted to keep. The final collection gave the Geopark a set of community-authored artworks that speak to how this landscape is lived in and loved. The oral histories captured during the project added another layer - voices that might otherwise have gone unrecorded, attached now to a specific piece of ground. The Joseph Herman Foundation's involvement added to the cultural heritage of the day: Herman spent decades in Ystradgynlais making art that took working people and their landscape seriously. Woven Places deliberately placed itself in that same tradition.
