Land Artist and Poet Winston Plowes explores nature and creativity
Alongside the Museum’s 2023 theme of Year of ‘the Wild’, local environmental artist Winston Plowes guided four different sessions exploring the connections between land art and creative writing. Together visitors have learnt simple and rewarding writing techniques and work with the natural materials that come to hand and see them with different eyes.
Over the year Winston crafted different workshops for visitors to engage with nature. Below you can find a collaborative poem written in a discussion around an autumn nature table. Visitors helped Winston to reimagine nature's treasures, and throughout the day a new group poem was formed.
Winston has also extended this practise to online. Over the past year each season has brought with is a new film by Winston, which has allowed people to explore different themes at home. You can find these videos below.
Winter Workshop
Spring Workshop
Summer Workshop
Autumn workshop
And Winston’s practise doesn’t stop there. Alongside encouraging visitors to explore nature, Winston Plowes also produces his own environmental artwork by experimenting with what comes to hand and accepting the never ending gift of random chance. He attempts to formalise the coincidental and emphasise patterns that are hidden in plain sight.
His art responds directly to his surroundings and often evolves from a random incident or on other occasions grows from a seed of thought via a preparatory sketch. Sometimes these framed instances would otherwise go unnoticed in their original context. The more he works with natural materials the more he has become aware of transience and loss, and wonders if his practice as a land artist could perhaps help him learn lessons of how to live with those ideas.
On the top of this page you’ll see photographs of the Land Art that Winston has created over the year in residence with the Bronte Parsonage Museum. You can also find a PDF that has photographs of Winston's Land Art installations alongside accompanying text where Winston explains his creations.. Click on the 'downloads' section on the left hand side of this webpage to see more.
Click read more to find out about Winston.