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 Unquiet is informed by the latest research about orchards and biodiversity. We will engage with the orchard landscape at Brockhampton Estate, 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.

We will enable proactive agency for creating collaborative and communal change via intuitive art processes, including residencies, installations, co-production, empathic group work, nutritional art, painting, on site interviews with experts, VR and AI.

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.