A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies Collaborative Community Art Project Announced!
Roots and Shoots is thrilled to announce a new collaborative community arts project with the Grounding Project and wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation’s Big City Butterflies. The art project will provide new opportunities for the Grounding Project group, as well as the wider Roots and Shoots community, to connect to butterflies and moths in a creative and meaningful way.
At Roots and Shoots we provide a sanctuary for nature across the site, with every green space designed to enrich biodiversity in the urban environment. In the past few years we have redeveloped our Wild Garden to be a pollinator’s paradise, with bountiful flowers blooming year-round, boosting the numbers of pollinating insects like butterflies, moths, and bees in the local area so much that the garden buzzes with life all summer.
We also provide a sanctuary for people, and for almost 10 years we have hosted the wonderful Grounding Project, a specialist NHS horticultural therapy programme for local refugees and asylum seekers, who have experienced trauma. The Grounding Project have their own green space onsite, the Calming Garden, where the group can come together in a safe and healing environment to connect with nature, explore and practise calming techniques and receive support from qualified clinical practitioners.
Last year we began collaborating with the brilliant people at Big City Butterflies on a range of environmental education activities, including habitat management training for our staff, and butterfly identification and recording sessions which use the Wild Garden as an education resource for our students. The lovely team at Big City Butterflies will also be running sessions like this at our next community open day in May (stay tuned for that announcement!) and for local school children this summer.
Our new collaborative community arts project will bring together everyone’s collective knowledge, talents and enthusiasm to create a permanent sculpture for the Wild Garden that celebrates butterflies and compassion for nature.
To learn about butterflies and create the sculpture, there will be a range of activities including classes on butterfly diversity and ecology from Butterfly Conservation, growing sessions on how to grow pollinating plants with our Director Linda, and a series of practical sculpture-making workshops with our expert gardener - who also happens to be a trained artist and jeweller - including drawing, copper shaping, enamelling and blacksmithing. Together, the Grounding Project group will create a cloud of colourful enamelled copper butterflies which will fly across our pollinator’s paradise - a celebration of the beauty of migration and caring for eachother and nature.
The project was kicked off in March with a wonderful visit to the Horniman Museum’s tropical butterfly house to get inspired.
The reveal of our beautiful butterfly sculpture will be on World Refugee Day, 20th June 2024 - stay tuned for updates on our social media!