The Rural School of Arts home within The People’s Forest will become a place to interweave creative intergenerational courses
Green timber framing
Blacksmithing
Carpentry
Ceramics
Weaving /Textiles
Soil to Soul nutrition & healing
Story, Song, poetry and Image crafting
Trainings for transformation
Celebrations of cultural heritage
The Rural School of Arts, will be unique in the land-based teaching that it offers, and its holistic approach to craft and health. All learners and visitors to the school will be nourished using ingredients that are grown through neighbouring small organic farm partnerships. Courses and journeys will teach amongst the wild, about the importance of wildness, dark skies and contemplation. Allowing the land to share its wisdom. We will host visitors in sustainably and soulfully built elemental spaces to re-connect to stillness.
Story of the School
The surrounding villages have planted a landscape rich with cultural history, craft and agricultural heritage. They carry the wisdom of Transhumance an ancient practice and a type of nomadism where there is a seasonal movement of animals between higher pastures on the mountain in summer and lower valleys in winter. Practices of working with land and sky rhythms that offer much wisdom to the modern pace yet are at a threshold of disappearing. These voices will be woven into the heart of the teachings offering the wisdom of this landscape a platform to shine. Offering these stories, reverence, celebration and in so doing re-position these ways of being to plant a new earth centered culture within the hands and hearts of the people.
Story from the villages
The School will offer teaching residences and camps to cultivate practice and knowledge. Celebrating Earth-centred traditions and governance systems routing learning, healing and making within a landscape.
Land based learning
The landscape can show us all we need to learn.Teaching us balance, harmony and resonance.
Working with the rhythms and offerings of the landscape we will develop creative pathways with local and international practitioners that cultivate reverence. Making and being in connection to land and elementals.
Within the land we will create spaces for gathering and collaboration, where individuals or groups come together to create, promote, and cultivate individual and social transformations through a culture of care and togetherness.
These spaces may operate through artistic and cultural expression, education and training, collaborative projects, experimentation and innovation.
Journeys and courses to reconnect with the creativity and solace within. Weaving together a deep ancestral knowing and belonging in the land
Visions for elemental Spaces
We will build a series of spaces, a learning house, resting house and dreaming houses for visitors and journeyers to expand into creativity and healing. These spaces will be created inspired by the natural order and geometry of nature. Soulful spaces built from elemental local materials and utilising local skills, that in their simplicity and material essence, encourage stillness and healing. Spaces that work with the natural elements, protecting from the extremes of the hot summer sun, and the cold north winter winds.
The Rural School of Arts will weave togetherness and reverence for the landscape into a unique creative pathway for local and international audiences
