We Foragers Unquiet

We Foragers Unquiet is a Salt Road Arts Council England funded commissioning program for 2023 delivered in partnership with the National Trust. Curated by Salt Road’s Dr Sally Payen for 11 artists creating new artwork, co-production workshops & exhibition exploring the devastating loss of foraging landscape; connecting & transporting people from socially deprived areas in Herefordshire & Birmingham with Brookhampton estate, a rural National Trust site on the Herefordshire / Worcestershire border.

We Foragers workshop with Salt Road artists Sally Payen and Pearl Colette

We Foragers Unquiet is informed by the latest research about orchards and biodiversity. We worked with the orchard landscape at Brockhampton Estate Herefordshire, Cannon Hill Park and Ward End Park in Birmingham, embodying ourselves and our audience into the greater story of loss – of orchards and plants, collapse in bee numbers and pollinators, which affects food scarcity, climate grief and pollution.

Workshop participants from Dolphin Womens Centre Birmingham at Brockhampton

We ran co-production workshops with communities from Birmingham and the Black Country to create collaborative and communal change via intuitive art processes, including residencies, installations, co-production, empathic group work, nutritional art, painting, and AI/Machine Learning.

An AI Machine Learning moving image work from an archive created in response to the ecological crisis by the artist Jaime Jackson with over 300 people at the National Trust’s Brockhampton Estate Orchards Herefordshire. Part of Salt Road’s We Foragers Unquiet Arts Council England funded program. Jaime invited people from Birmingham and National Trust visitors to imagine they were bees pollinating the orchard’s fruit blossoms in April and May 2023.

‘Just wanted to say a huge thank you to all for firstly organising this trip and secondly thank you to the National Trust for hosting us. I have seen the pictures and the it looks like the kids and had an amazing time and I have received extremely positive feedback from the staff.’  

Maxine Mills Dolphin Women’s Centre

‘You have both been so absolutely brilliant to work with, and I have really enjoyed being part of your fantastic project and witnessing the special relationships you have developed over many years with your partners in Birmingham.’

Katy Llewellyn National Trust project manager at Brockhampton