Summer solstice 2025 saw hundreds of people watch a remarkable performance, Stand of the Sun, created by Bryony Ella with composer Bumi Thomas. Funded by a Wellcome Trust Discovery grant, this project is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Liverpool and urban communities looking at how we are being affected by our overheating cities, with a particular focus on London, New York and Paris. This passionate comprehension of our evolving relationship with the sun, and how shifting climates are straining public health systems dealing with hotter summers, invites us to understand what is important to know about our bodies experiencing this rapid change. It is one of more than 30 projects our Cultural Reforesting programme has supported, responding to the ecological crisis.
Cultural Reforesting asks the big question; how can we renew our relationship with nature? This question, an open ‘how’ question, has been responded to by dozens of artists with their expansive collaborators, including the more-than-human world, hoping to breathe life into a cacophony of place-based actions where people are a generous and imaginative part of the ecosystems in which they spend every day. Through this collaborative, caring and generous set of actions, a constant of hope binds the work across this 10-year programme, spanning this decade, and from these actions we find support for our health, both individually and as communities.
The burgeoning cultural forest was seeded by the Arts Service of a Local Authority, as part of a vibrant ecosystem in South-West London, Orleans House Gallery, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. This ecosystem includes a woodland, with international species, a building with colonial history, including French royalty, and an experimental contemporary art series of research projects, exhibitions, performances and workshops. It is a place of diverse stories from many voices contemplating 21st century relationships as part of nature. We are nature – is the simple, yet hard to grasp and act on core truth of the work. A beat has been growing from this ecosystem, which sits on the River Thames, giving multi-sensory exploration to this relationship which sits deep inside all of us. Healthy ecosystems support healthy people, the big question is how can this relationship be tended every day, as a ritual, as a personal as well as connected experience and as a place for everyone, all ages and backgrounds, particularly those who feel excluded from these spaces?
Cultural Reforesting projects have planted a circle of Oaks on Hampton Common with arts and ecology trailblazers Ackroyd & Harvey, laid a multicultural garden on Hounslow Heath led by Nutkhut, and invited Global Majority groups to contemplate a relationship with the River Thames with the work of Ama Josephine Budge. Indeed, spending time on a vital relationship – that of humans as part of our ecosystems – brings about acts of care and humanity that supports wellbeing with all involved. We are currently designing an art installation for Orleans House Gallery inviting all-comers to share their acts of care, with psychologist Dr Hirotaka Imada and artist Kat Pegler. The idea being that hearing about the acts of others can support our own hopeful intentions.
Cultural Reforesting aligns with a range of global research initiatives and provocations, such as Professor Tim Lenton’s hopeful social tipping points narrative in which the collective weight of community ecology actions can on a local level counter the global climate tipping points. We also bring ideas of human flourishing into the programme, a global research project by Harvard University looking at what supports a flourishing life. It gives action to the Climate and Nature Emergency declaration made by us, and others across the UK and internationally. Additionally Cultural Reforesting positions indigenous knowledge and practice with the context of our own places and activities, we have shared knowledge and creativity with First Nation communities from Borneo, Finland and Brazil. We ask the question how can this healthful world view of humans as part of nature resonate and become embedded in our part of London, with our ecosystems?
Cultural Reforesting has supported artists, collectives and communities to renew this relationship, energised by authentic hope, as Rebecca Solnit explains, aiming to make a difference in the real world. Wellbeing is a by-product of participating in art, and of being present as part of nature. So, the Cultural Reforesting programme as a series of ways to be part of nature, a regenerative, collaborative part of each ecosystem, is a place of individual and community well-being, and it is important to state, ecosystem well-being. We supported dance artist duo Katye Coe and Tom Goodwin, through their Kinship Workshop work, with a project called, Nature Centred Wellbeing Programme. Local authority staff contemplated the world around us as a feature of the working day, in many senses a place which regularly negatively impacts wellbeing. Staff from across the local authority took part, hoping to recognise how art and being present with nature is vital to all of our days, throughout each day. Indeed, how might we make it a given practice for all of our days, particularly at work.
Richmond has been fertile ground for this work, as a Local Authority which sits either side of the Thames, has many idiosyncratic ecosystems. We have worked with council teams to develop Cultural Reforesting projects, with our planning team artists Harun Morrison and Kim Coleman investigated the role of darkness in our multi-species society, seeking to understand how local authorities should light our urban environments. This project worked through the complexity of the issue, which includes how artificial lighting impacts our mental health and sleep, alongside the impact it has on our ecosystems, particularly on species who need darkness, such as bats and moths. The result of the research project was a report with recommendations as to how we can work as a local authority, using local multi-stakeholder intelligence to make relevant hyper local plans.
The beat of Cultural Reforesting continues for the rest of the decade, continuing to support collaborative action on the ecological crisis, continuing to support artist research into flourishing ecosystems, with connected, imaginative people as a caring heartbeat of these ecosystems. Wellbeing and community health is always a feature of these projects, either as a direct intervention for this, or as a byproduct of being part of arts projects focussing on the ecological crisis. We hope to find new collaborators and partners, so please do make yourselves known if contemplating how we can renew our relationship with nature.
Project links
Cultural Reforesting: How can we renew our relationship with nature? – Orleans House Gallery
Kinship Workshop - Katye Coe and Tom Goodwin
Darkness in Urban Spaces - London Borough of Richmond upon Thames
Richmond Arts & Ideas Festival
Rainforest Lifelines – Orleans House Gallery
My Body is a Sundial—Bryony Ella’s Solar Cartography of Urban Heat — MADE IN BED Magazine