Fully realised permaculture designs focussed on arts practice in different ways:
Natures Winter (Liz Postlethwaite) – Design working with local communities around Lake Windermere to create a family friendly installation at Windermere Jetty that explored ideas of nature and weather in relation to the lake and to local community stories
Mr Seel’s Garden (Liz Postlethwaite) – Project working with local people in Liverpool to develop a creative way to share stories around food heritage as part of a community celebration in culmination of a wider research project.
Mud and Culture (Liz Postlethwaite) – Project creating a child led outdoor group which supports participants to explore and enjoy a range of outdoor spaces using the Permaculture Ethics as a foundation for exploration.
Involve Earth (Sally Hughes) – To design and deliver an event series as a form of collaborative climate action which brings people together in Conversation Circles to explore the themes communicated in the ‘On Loss and Damage’ exhibition at The Turner House gallery in Penarth, and our own personal perspectives on climate change, culminating in the production of a spoken word poem, and performance event, by 4th June 2023.
Creative Arts Practice – Sally Hughes – To define and develop creative arts practice through a performance poem and deep dive into patterns, principles and process.
Permaculture Design of Contemporary Art Exhibition – Skye Jin – To design a contemporary art exhibition process that regenerates natural resources and many forms of capital for a sustainable livelihood and ethical basis. Close circuits in the production, exhibition period and afterlife.
Previous graduates from our Permaculture Design Course for Aritsts and Creatives who are all using permaculture ideas and tools in their work in different ways:
Alice McCabe – Floral Studio based in London combining art, horticultural knowledge and floristry expertise.
Alison Romaines – Studied architecture/landscape architecture. Community Youth Organiser with Civic Power Fund with focus upon community building and organising in generative ways; creating constellations of care and reconnecting ourselves to the land. Also work at Age UK Sheffield part-time – supporting the social/arts program at a community centre which involves creative sessions for older people experiencing memory loss and/or loneliness. Volunteer with Sheffield Community Land Trust who are keen to support the development of community-owned, secure and affordable housing.
Angelica Vanasse – Freelance arts engagement consultant and creative practitioner / process and learner-centered approaches rooted in site-specific creativity developed through over 20 years of exploration with people of all ages. Expertise in cultivating connection through creativity, programme and audience development, co-enquiry/co-creation, community engagement, interpretation, strategic planning, audience cultivation and consultation, evaluation and creative event programming.
Anna Colin – Has worked as a curator since 2005, whether in a freelance or institutional capacity, in the UK (where she lives), in France (where she is from), and in other (largely European) contexts. Her curatorial work has been engaged with exhibition making, public programming, commissioning, and collaborative processes, and with cultural practices involved at local, social, educational, and environmental levels. Invested in counter-hegemonic spaces, histories, and figures, her practice straddles the curatorial, the pedagogical, the ecological, and the horticultural. She splits her time between teaching on the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London; working on both large and small-scale research and curatorial projects, some of which are associated with Goldsmiths; training in horticulture and permaculture design; and writing.
Bernadette Russell – A passionate champion of kindness, wonder, hope, joy and FUN! She is an author, performance storyteller, theatre maker, workshop facilitator, cabaret MC , playwright and tree planter. She performs her own stories as well and traditional stories everywhere- including cabarets, sheltered housing, schools, parks, gardens, forests, vintage clothes shops, launderettes, beaches, in peoples beds, once even inside a Police Box! She loves being outside and can often be found in the woods. She writes stories on walls, chalk poetry onto pavements and leaves magical notes inside strangers pockets.
Cathy Rogers – Works with photochemical moving image film, for projection and exhibition (framed lightboxes) using plants as a subject. Sometimes uses plant based developers. Hosts community film screenings. Her work is process driven and is inspired by plants and architecture.
Charlotte Mountford – A cultural producer and programmer based in Caithness in the Scottish Highlands. She is interested in participatory and celebratory work that promotes place and explores the role of arts and creative practitioners in community development. I have a socially engaged producing practice, and am particularly interested in ‘rural’ creativity. She is Director of Lyth Arts Centre, the UK’s most northerly mainland arts centre.
Emma Burtt – Works as a gardener, exploring a more earth centered, holistic, creative, fulfilling, balanced and reciprocal way of being and working with mother Earth, soil, plants, trees and people. Particularly drawn to do this in creative ways.
Emma Waterford – Actor, writer, improviser and cabaret performer. She loves telling stories and has been lucky enough to perform across the UK, Europe and in America. She facilitates workshops in art, craft, drama, reminiscence, folk dance and improvisation. Workshops can be created to suit a theme or event and are suitable for all ages.
Frederica Brooks – Art psychotherapist and supervisor of creatives
Georgie Hook – Performance designer and researcher. Her background is in theatre and creating live performance events in collaboration with other artists. As a designer her focus is on the visual, material and relational aspects of environments. She is currently undertaking a practice research PhD in which she considers performance design as a way of cultivating ecological awareness and attuning to everyday environments. This involves design-led participatory practice. She is interested in incorporating permaculture into her creative practice with regards to implementing ecological modes of living within everyday environments. She is also interested in the intersections of performance design and permaculture as spatial practices.
Jen Quinn – Theatre maker, director, dramaturg and producer. Interested in how performance might play a role in moving towards climate justice?
Jenna Ashton – Lecturer and an arts-practice researcher working on cultural analysis and theory at the nexus between community heritage, ecologies, place, and social and environmental justice. Background in artmaking, exhibition curation, creative producing, and arts-education. Her work is situated within socially engaged practice methodology.
Jessica Kerr – I teach in Sistema Scotland, a programme that aims to empower young people and strengthen communities through music. As a cellist, I am also engaged in developing my own music projects that bring together people and environmental or ecological themes.
Jez Green – Writer of poetry, prose, journaling, other scribblings… Creative practice involves a lot of walking, sitting, watching, listening etc in a local urban wild space. Founder member of a small creative collective called Creature – who make zines, put up guerrilla galleries and generally collaborate. And a founder member and trustee for Manchester Street Poem
Katie Shepherd – loves using creativity to help make permaculture design as accessible as possible for anyone who wants to learn more. She uses permaculture principles, ethics and tools in designing healing and regeneration in subject areas that push the edges of where permaculture design is typically located. She is passionate about empowering others to also make positive changes in their lives by using permaculture in everyday situations.
Laura Eldret – an artist, researcher and organiser. She is interested in the commonalities that bring diverse groups of people together and the productive tensions of social encounters. Drawing on methodologies of ethnography, sociology and ecology, she explores ways to affirm the value of conversation and social encounters across species. Her art and research explores how commoning can be a creative social collective practice that creates new forms of environmental care and sustainable exchanges between human and non-human ecosystems. She is concerned with establishing new values of engagement, ruralities, collective imaginations and artistic exchange that foster wellbeing, resilience, and sustainable ways of being in a time of climate emergency.
Lauren Saunders – Visual and participatory artist, researcher, educator and activist based in Hull, UK. Co-Director of arts journal-collective The Critical Fish which makes writing and thinking about visual arts and culture more inclusive. Often through lenses of feminism, disability and class, she draws in the expanded field to explore environmental sustainability and regenerative practice in the context of the climate crisis.
Lorenza Cassini – a qualified architect and urban designer with an MSc in environmental and energy science. Her career spans across two decades developing solutions to combat climate change with a focus on just energy transition. She has worked both with the private and public sectors, supporting them to produce in cooperation with their communities, innovative projects.
Louise Robson – Project manager at Keep Britain Tidy. Previously director of Everyday, a small community arts organisation based in Wigan, and a freelance artist, where she produced work with technology, based around the idea of systems and systems thinking. Also a keen gardener with a huge interest in nature and the systems present within it.
Mahsa Shahbandian – Sustainable up cycling. Textile printing, tapestry weaving. Interdisciplinary art and design ideas.
Michaela Lesayova – creative coach and artist. Her career originated in the creative industrries where she initially trained in events management and worked with international festivals and companies (theatre, dance, opera). She was involved in education within the arts through this work and worked with young children, youth and families. She has an active creative and artistic practice and work with and produce sensory sensitive art informed by colour, textile materials and nature. She is also a Photographer specialising in film photography.
Musa Francis – a mental health coach, he help his clients create healthy lifestyle habits and regenerative self-care rituals for better mental health so they can feel their best whilst doing the creative work they love.
Polydord Wasokye – Founder of the Life Skills for Better Future (LSBF) organization based in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. LSBF is a beacon of hope, dedicated to empowering refugees through vocational training and sustainable development programs, fostering a community where self-reliance and economic independence are within reach. LSBF has initiated programs like Livelihoods for Resilience, targeting the nutritional and educational needs of women and children and cultivating permaculture practices. The organization’s mission extends to enhancing employability and entrepreneurship, aiming to dismantle the barriers to economic advancement for Kakuma’s inhabitants. It envisions a future where equity, opportunity, and self-sufficiency are accessible to all.
Rebekah Adaoma Warmington – Educator currently working part-time on a co-creation Community Gardening project with young people in her local community. Has experience of working practically with Permaculture in different outdoor settings, and works to incorporate Permaculture values and ethics into her pedagogy as a teacher, and in her day to day life. Also interested in social and organisational Permaculture and supports and volunteers with different organisations who advocate for social justice, equity, equality, and who build awareness around the lived experiences of Global Majority people.
Rhiannon Hunter – Artist, based London, UK. Her artistic practice uses forms of storying through film, text, sound and installation to explore relationships between people, non-human agents and places that are formed through networks of encounter, co-existence and contradictions. Hunter engages ‘noticing’ and collage as methodologies for capturing fleeting interactions, joy, connectivity and wonder that generate associations across personal scales. Recent audio and film works include inviting groups to take part in recreational activities in a defunct commercial premises, working with a volunteer group engaged in land management in urban municipal parks, and an immersive soundscape of decomposing waste.”
Rosanna McKenna – Artist & Creative practitioner, who grew up in Cheshunt.
Her arts practice is a process of creative mapping and consultation, rooted in people, place and community. She uses these tools to make visible what is present around a subject, Place, building, organisation, People/group…etc… to inform discussions around what is missing.
Ruth Moilliet – Artist and sculptor who uses the natural world as her inspiration, looking at the coexistence of species, in particular at plants and their pollinators. In recent years has been researching and utilising recycled materials in my work, in particular discarded single used plastics. Has also researched historic local plant collectors and studied the decline and extinction of plant species which she has referenced in the work she has produced. For some years has looked at the patterns and repetition of forms within plant species and it is her intention to work with this and develop it further in her current work.
Ruth Singer – An artist & maker exploring personal and collective narratives through textiles. She creates for exhibitions, commissions and projects and support other artists through resources and Maker Membership. She also researchs and writes, and I loves generating her own projects, artist residencies and making exciting projects happen. All of her work, across all of these different aspects is centred around making with meaning. She is fascinated by the hidden stories of care in all our lives and in historic objects and places. Her work grows from research and contemplation and from collaborating with others.
Sally Hughes – as an educator and organiser of community events, she has spent many years creating space for people to come together, with the broad aim of growing community and shaping change. She uses her creative skills, drawn from my background in the visual and performative arts, and permaculture, to design and curate contexts for people to explore how we could live well in our communities, find ways to lower our environmental impact and rekindle our dependencies on one another.
Sarah Hymas – writes, publishes and performs work about ecology, specifically relationship with the ocean: through poems, artistbooks and immersive walks. She runs workshops to deepen her practice and share with others the value and intrinsic role of creativity in our lives.
Sarah Turner – Freelance Curator and Creative Producer with a focus on design, community engagement and the public realm
Simon Curtis – Culture and climate consultant, Convenor GMAST
Sheree Mack – An artist, a teacher and a facilitator of creativity who’s been sharing herauthentic self online for so many years now she has lost count. Her practice includes abstract painting, photography and the magic of visual journaling which incorporates paints, images, words, collages, quotes, photography, heart and soul and self-compassion. She has recently wandered in to the field of Permaculture Design and she is fixing to decolonise the space one project at a time through her Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. You can explore this journey as it emerges here.
Artists / Organisations using permaculture ideas and thinking more generally in their work:
Ann Marie Culhane – participatory artist who uses permaculture throughout her work.
Bare Project – Hinterlands – a largescale project along the Sheffield-Tinsley canal exploring plant folklore. Permaculture principles were central to the development and delivery of the project.
Edge Effects at Whitechapel Art Gallery – a participatory project that takes inspiration from nature to shape an ongoing series of artist residencies with primary and secondary schools in Newham, East London.
Forgan Arts Centre – developing a business plan for 2025 to 2028 with social permaculture as a guiding practice.
Heart of Glass: – exploring the idea of a Permaculture Artist Researcher in residence to develop a permaculture working group. This will explore how they can bring together different policy responsibilities to develop a more holistic approach to management and governance, as well as programme content. This will focus on the permaculture ethics, and developing deepening practices of care.
Left Coast: -currently working with a critical friend to bring Permaculture Ethics to the heart of their creative process and organisational structure.
Lyth Arts Centre – their director participated in the Arts PDC and is now using permaculture design to create feasibility plan for the future of the organisation
Sean Roy Parker – a visual artist, writer and landworker who works open-endedly across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, foraging, cooking, publishing, workshops and community gardening. Until its closure, he was a core member of The Field, an experimental artist-run living project in an ex-National Coal Board and Steiner School building in Derbyshire, East Midlands.
Seed Sedgemore – organisation built with an inspiration from the permaculture principles at its core. Working to make creative arts, culture and heritage part of everyday life in Sedgemoor by growing new opportunities for its people to participate, create and celebrate.
Three Rivers – permaculture ethics and principles are central to their decision making and creative programming, in particular through their Tump 39 Project.
Void Arts Centre – Arts centre using social permaculture to help inform how programmes and the organisation may be more sustainable and civicly-engaged going forward.