EXHIBITION - 24 MAY - 1 JUL '24
As part of our De Nadder programming, three local schools – Port Regis in Shaftesbury, St. John’s in Tisbury and Semley Village School – have worked together on a project supported by Messums West to explore the natural wildlife of the Nadder Valley and record the natural environment they discover. The children range from age 8 to 13, and each one has been given a canvas on which to draw and paint a creature or a plant. The exhibition programming not only served as a teaching tool for the children in the fundamental skills of looking, drawing and painting, but also for the children to learn to identify some of the rare wildlife in the local area, from wildflowers and mammals to birds and butterflies.
Messums has an Active Environmentalism programme supporting understanding and facilitating engagement with the natural world. It is underpinned by the appreciation and respect for nature to which most creative will readily align and more broadly to an aspiration that creativity, like problem solving, will continue to offer us solutions. This too can be said of young children, who have an innate sense of creativity as well as wonder in the natural world. These connections may be at risk of diminishing from the lives of children immersed in an increasingly digital world and exacerbated by pressures on the arts as well as on the environment as a whole.
