Welcome to our Winter Solstice newsletter. As the Earth crisis, global politics and conflict intensify, we need some respite at this season of gifting and communing. We offer some gifts for you, our supporters, as well as some news updates, and wish you the very best for the Winter season.
Gifts from Climate Museum UK members
South Downs National Park
After a 12-month consultancy with South Downs National Park, we are pleased to announce that our set of place-based educational resources has been released. We are grateful to teachers and pupils at pilot schools who have helped us to road-test and refine the resources.
Here you will find lesson plans exploring themes of nature connection, sustainable living and caring for wild places.
Sign of the Underground
Visual artist Jaime Jackson’s new moving image work for his Sign of the Underground programme was co-produced with the help of young people in Cannock Chase.
They drew the outline of the lines of their hand, like roots, in workshops which created a dataset for the digital artwork.
Amateur Ancestor Story – Two Ammonites
Play video link to listen to Justine’s story (free Vimeo account login needed)
What do you see when you look at an ammonite? Delve into the story of two fossils with curator and storyteller Justine Boussard, aka the Amateur Ancestor.
This story will be available to watch until 5th January.
Gifts from Climate Museum UK members
Join the Earth Talk course
‘Floods through the boardwalk’, drawing experiments to imagine future climate impacts, Bridget McKenzie, 2023
This is a course, an online community of practice and a playbook that offers a rich set of tools for holding effective conversations and creative activities about the Earth Crisis.
It’s led by Bridget McKenzie, under the CMUK umbrella and is open to anyone interested in accessing the following benefits:
- A network of like-minds to share your practice and challenges
- A playbook in ten parts: see part one here
- Seven online workshops and ongoing access to repeat courses
- At least 128 activities – with high-quality delivery resources.
The first course has run, so we are recruiting now for new joiners, with the first workshop at the end of January. More info and booking
Ambulatory Imaginations
Genevieve sitting in a black manual wheelchair looking over the promenade railings at Gorleston seafront.
Under Open Sky founder and CMUK associate founder Genevieve Rudd has been ill and out of action for the past year with an acquired brain injury (aneurysm, stroke/brain bleed, and associated neurosurgeries and rehabilitation).
Informed by this traumatic health experience and her extensive previous work leading and developing participatory arts/nature and wellbeing programmes with communities, she intends to, with support whilst she continues her recovery, to develop a new programme – Ambulatory Imaginations.
This will be a neuro-impairment-inclusive creative nature project for, with, and by people with a neurological/central nervous system condition, illness, injury or impairment in Norfolk and Suffolk. To connect with nature and make art together in mobility- and sensory-inclusive ways in 2025.
As part of this, she is kindly asking potential participants – those with relevant lived experience and living locally – to contribute thoughts in a survey to aid project development at this early stage. Contributions to the survey are hugely appreciated. We believe that mobility and sensory processing differences shouldn’t be a barrier to connecting with nature or creative expression.
Climate Museum UK 
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