bolton’s lost words

In Autumn 2021 I worked with ten community participants on a project initiated and commissioned by Bolton Library, Museum and Archive Service to create new ‘story trails’ in the central park of Westhoughton. Inspired by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ Lost Words book, over six weeks the group worked with me and Manchester-based professional writer James Varney to ‘reimagine’ what a traditional story trail could be.

Both James and I work in a socially engaged or participatory way, so much of the decision making and direction was steered in collaboration with the group. Using the book as inspiration, we loosely planned five different workshops themed around nature including shape and colour, hidden, beauty and loss (all great jumping off points). Within each session, we collectively explored participants’ memories and stories about nature, Westhoughton and Central Park and used creative writing (including visual poetry), photography and analogue collage to explore these narratives. But first, we started with a ‘getting to know you’ session so that the group could find out more about the process, each other, and hotseat us as artists!

Our defined output set by staff was to produce trails for Westhoughton library visitors to use in the park. These are currently being designed and produced by the library service.

The project was one of five different artist and community collaborations happening across libraries in Bolton, funded by Arts Council England.

Work below by participants, James and myself.