The SDLL project aims to turn big dreams into reality: we work with school communities and their gardens and redesign these as generative spaces where languages, the arts and principles of permaculture can thrive. While we find our pathways and develop our slow and nature-attuned solutions, people may wonder how do we plan to bring all these complex dimensions together. How can we morph the arts and sustainability with multilingual designs? To be able to accomplish this mission, we have brought into our team three lead artists with unique visions and strong permaculture understandings. Among the three artists, Louise McVey will lead activities and share her creativity built over the years while modelling clay and ceramics.
Louise is bringing to the project wonderful concept ideas that materialise and integrate permaculture design principles and a passion for interactive artistry. Her creations set up beautiful dialogues with nature and one of her most recent projects is a Living Bench. The short video below (4 min.) created by Paul McConnach gives you an insight into the creative process, starting with the concept idea, moving into action, and leading towards the completed bench design now awaiting nature to contribute to the Living Bench.
The Living Bench is a wonderful example of how art integrates into nature’s rhythms. It is also a call for all of us working interdisciplinarily to pay attention to the edges of our professional trainings, to open up to new fields and ask questions anew, to move more into the life of communities that surround us. In these ways, we will be able to discover new solutions that our current environments really need. If you’re interested in knowing more about what Louise is currently working on in our project, follow our upcoming blogs where we will soon share stories about our school windchimes.
