This is a project description for our ACE grant application

*New project partner is Herefordshire Council’s Rotherwas Archive and Records Centre and the Rotherwas Together, as well at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery’s River Project being organised for the Gallery’s 2027 opening. These new partners link the project with archives and contemporary work relating to The River Lugg/River Wye, including hydrology, the history of the rivers, farming and the river.

The Watercourse Way is a place and community based visual artist commission, socially engaged workshop and exhibition program, connecting people in the West Midlands to their local water networks and an ideascape of reflections. Using watery art processes as a fluid methodology of elemental working, we will explore the notion that we are water. In the Tao, water is ‘the Way’; the source and power that sustains the world. We know that our bodies are two thirds water. In embodying watery principles, we can discover a better way of living.

Pervasive metaphor of water… water as the highest good.  Water is a metaphor for the Way (Tao) or the source and power that sustains the world. For example the sage will go around obstacles rather than aggressively confront them – just like water

Alan Watts ‘Tao: The Watercourse Way’

Project outline

The project themes include: water and its edges, lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, canals, clouds, aquatic plants, pollution, health of waterways, water in the atmosphere, water as the unconscious mind, our body’s water.  The approach is also watery in the sense that we are exploring through painting, writing and film the wisdom/element of water and flowing as a way of being; using art processes that connect the body, breath, and wellbeing.

This a place based program which connects people across Herefordshire, Birmingham and the Black Country with the water and landscape near them, including the River Wye at The National Trust’s The Weir Garden, River Lugg with the Leominster Cultural Consortium, Ward End Park Lake Birmingham and the canal network in Birmingham and the Black Country.

All the project’s commissioned artists (images below) Sally Payen, Jaime Jackson, Stephen Whitehead and mentored early stage career artist Pearl Colette will all work with the community groups on the co-produced artwork ‘The Watercourse’.

The relationship that children and adolescents have with water goes beyond its basic function in daily life. Water is an element that awakens emotions and feelings in people, both individually and collectively. Diana Wiesner Nature of Cities Festival

Sally Payen, We Foragers Commission for permanent display of Thinktank, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2021

Salt Road is part of Arts Council England’s place based peer learning network we will share our project updates on this network. We will also link the project to the Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) WMCA community group engagement network which we are part of in partnership with the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), appointed by the government to work with the people of the West Midlands to develop a regional Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS).

Sally Payen, The Fence and the Shadow, Government Art Collection exhibition Taking Up Space, London

Our lead artists Jaime Jackson and Dr. Sally Payen have a strong track record in producing high quality environmentally themed studio artworks and socially engaged co-production practice.

Jaime Jackson moving image installation with dancer Awantika Duprey
Sally Payen, commission for Dolphin Women’s Centre Birmingham 2023

Sign of the Underground co-produced with over 200 pupils from Cannock Chase, moving image installation Jaime Jackson, Salt Road
Sally Payen’s one person exhibition The Fence and the Shadow at The MAC Birmingham, based on the Greenam Women peace camp. Salt Road also ran the social engaged women in protest socially engaged program around the exhibition with the MAC
Salt Road artist Stephen Whitehead running a land art workshop at National Trust’s Croft Castle for our ACE funded Traders Tracks project,
Socially engaged Workshops run by Salt Road’s Sally Payen at East Birmingham’s Ward End Park with Dolphin Womens Centre and Norton Hall Children and Family Centre for our ACE funded project
Exhibition installations and workshop for our ACE funded Traders Tracks project in Hereford and Worcester Libraries
Salt Road’s Jaime Jackson presenting the Salt Road exhibition for The International Glacial Society Ice in a Sustainable Society conference in Bilbao with Climate scientists and engineers

Smelling Mushroom World, 1, 2023, watercolour on unbleached watercolour paper, 76 x 56 cm, exhibition installation Sally Payen, Winterbourne House and Gardens Gallery 2023
Sally Payen Smelling Mushroom World, 2023, watercolour on unbleached watercolour paper, 76 x 56 cm

Pearl Colette the oneiric earth, cross-stitch embroidery, 2020
Pearl Colette Life-sized bog woman/yeti protector, hand-embroidered on Japanese sashiko fabric, featuring ninth century runes from the Rök runestone, 2024.
Jaime Jackson Sign of the Underground oil on canvas 2024 40 cms x 50 cms
Salt Road workshop for the STEM Big Bang fair NEC Birmingham with Climate Museum UK
over 1500 people took part in a co-produced drawing over three days based on field microscopic images of leaves, and discussions about the idea that we are nature

Salt Road’s workshop and field trip for the Nature of Cities festival 2024, lead by artist Poppy Flint, Christopher Elmerick, director and cultural curator at Greenhill gallery kulturschoepfer Berlin, and scientists from the University of Amsterdam.

The artistic results of our project will be:

1.  Five new sets of artists’ artworks about water to be exhibited as pop up exhibitions, as part of the engagement practice.

1.1 Motion and movement with film dance and motion capture to create a digital installation.

1.2 Using art writing and researching watery ideas, creating an online blog, leading into a textile’s artwork.

1.3 Experimenting and exploring water issues on large scale watercolours, placing people who work with the health of water into the work.

1.4 A series of paintings exploring environmental issues and well-being about the river.

1.5 A series of paintings linking bodily blood and lymphatic networks with water courses through landscapes.

2. A socially engaged co-production artwork with artists and communities through workshops: Watercourse’  Inspired by influences from traditional Chinese ideograms, characters, and contemporary emojis. Participants will be invited to paint and create their own ideogram/emoji, inspired by water and the flow (painting as embodied slow breathwork). Brought together for a large-scale painting.

3. Pop up exhibitions of artworks in public spaces where we hold our workshops.

Our aim is to help people find ways of dealing with personal stress and eco-anxiety by unlocking their creativity by exploring people’s local water networks.

We have long known that connecting with nature in green spaces is great for our mental health. Now fresh research is showing that time in blue spaces – by the coast, rivers and even fountains in the park – is even more restorative. Catherine de Lange – New Scientist