Arts and outreach
“Maybe the only way to save the world is to re-enchant it… to love things, and to feel that they have some kind of greater presence or power.”
— Helen Macdonald
A call for river samples
We believe there must be a creative response to the crisis facing the Wye. In sharing your images, observations, memories, stories and works of art we can create together an evolving collection of river samples. This collection will ebb and flow like the river itself and reveal the varied ways we interact with and are influenced by the Wye. Your contributions will form the heart of this project. We are interested in everything.
In 2023 we exhibited many creative river samples alongside our citizen science data at the Hay Festival.
Help us build our collection
LiftTheRiver is a way for anyone with a connection to the Wye to contribute something personal. It could be a photo taken on your phone, a sketch, a poem inspired by the river, a memory of the Wye. Perhaps a song, a performance, a film or a sound recording? This is a project open to new ideas and diverse ways of exploring our relationship to the river.
For future generations
Through workshops, events and school visits FORW hope to educate the next generation of river guardians. We believe the river should be properly recognised for the inspiration it provides to young people and adults and the contribution it makes to the wellbeing and happiness of those who live and grow up beside it.
The River Wye a S.A.C*
*Special Area of Creativity
Featured river samples
Below are a few river samples submitted to LiftTheRiver to get us going. As the collection grows we hope to use these in different settings and to encourage collaboration. Perhaps a poem can be set to music or an image translated into a poem? Maybe a memory can be sketched or painted? Themes will appear and exhibitions may result based upon these themes. Please feel welcome to contribute and participate in this project. The river needs our attention.
River Sample : Magic : Jean Atkin : Spell to Lift The River
River Sample : Photography : Stu Roberts : Heron friend
Watching the river, somewhere between Hay Bridge and The Warren.
River Sample : Poetry : James Roberts : Goshawk
I don’t want to know the name
of the colour of this sky
filtered through new leaves
and reflected in the dish of a petal
floating downstream.
Somewhere in the maze of high-grown oaks,
cushioned by the call of a waterfall,
a goshawk’s nest is filled with alabaster eggs.
I’m hazing my sight so all existence
is sheltered beneath trees.
They stretch for miles
beyond the bone-bare mountains.
Paths wander there without horizons
and everything seen can only be seen
through the translucency of another.
All light is dappled, and thoughts
fly from themselves like goshawks.
We’re shapes imagined by a forest,
streams flowing through it,
dropping over stones and ledges,
quiet as air while we fall,
music echoing from the places
where we land.
River Sample : Painting : Maggy Roberts : Wye Valley
River Sample : Objects : Emily Hedges : River bowls
“I am making a series of bowls in white earthenware to represent the River Wye. Each one will undergo a Saggar firing, filled with a handful of mud from the river margin at a particular point along the river’s course. The minerals in the mud will react with the heat and mark the surface of the clay. The effects will be unpredictable and I’m hoping they will vary. This bowl is the first in the series and represents the Warren at Hay.”
River Sample : Experience : Connah Thomas : First canoe trip
“I’ve never done anything like this. We had to steer past fallen trees and over rapids. It was scary and brilliant. It made me feel great.”
River Sample : Poetry : Robert Minhinnick : Gwy
Every tide an incantation
ceaseless from the source.
Come closer.
Much closer.
This first drop
a rice grain that soon becomes a flood.
Then as the Wye wends
it warns.
Who is this rebellious child
with a thousand questions only she might ask?
No, it’s our next door neighbour
unrecognizable in her yellow mask.
Wales is the shape
of an oak leaf,
its rivers are veins,
in supernatural greens
through mist, these bridges and waterfalls
are spectral at dawn,
these leas and leats and limestone moraines
and the pointless prosecution of our names…
Come closer.
Much closer.
Each shadow is a shoal,
a shape misunderstood
as language itself
brightens in glacial dew.
Wherever we’re from
these broken British words
are forever new
yet subterranean in the soul.
The reefs in the river, its gravel swales
were here before England and Wales.
Come closer.
Much closer.
Every tide an incantation
ceaseless from the source.
And as our Wye wends,
it warns.
Who is this rebellious child
with a hundred questions only she might ask?
No, it’s our next door neighbour
unrecognizable in her yellow mask.
Both countries are crossed
by its courses,
algae floes its crown,
cray and caddis and kingfishers now
but venomous
the coming vacuum.
River music?
Sap is a song in our minds
even when we fail to hear
its orchestra within a thousand trees,
while Wye sips
from a thousand wellsprings
for every tide is an incantation
ceaseless from the source….
Come closer…
Much closer
*******
1.2.21
River Sample : Project : Bell Selkie : Resecration
Poet Bell Selkie Lovelock has been making pilgrimages to the Afon Gwy for over 20 years and her musings and invitations to people who wish to LiftTheRiver will explore the other worlds and beings that the river navigates.