Artwork:Plantwork On Grief
Artwork:Plantwork On Grief
This is a quiet invitation to place your grief somewhere outside your body, combining paint and plants. Not a class or therapy but something older than both. Saturday 13th September 10am to 4pm.
The art will be facilitated by Caroline Perkins RCA, QEST scholar. In this workshop, we create a collective surface for grief — not on stretched canvas or paper, but on what holds us: the floor beneath our feet. You will be guided through a series of intuitive, body-led mark-making processes using oil bars, charcoal, pigment, and cloth. We’ll layer, smudge, scrub, and cover again. This is a slow, physical dialogue between material and memory, presence and loss.
Whether kneeling, standing, or reaching — the work becomes an extension of your inner world. It doesn’t ask for language. It doesn’t demand beauty. It asks for honesty.
This is a space where:
● Repetition becomes prayer
● Paint becomes breath
● Layers become the history of what you’ve survived
There is no right way. No wrong emotion. You are welcome to be silent. You are welcome to weep. You are welcome to leave parts unfinished.
The floor will hold what you can no longer carry.
The plant work will be facilitated by our resident ethnobotanist Jane Acton BSc MA with 40 years of working with plants and people. You will meet plants which have been used for millenia to help us through good times and bad. Plants to help us towards wellness; some you will know well and some you won’t.
We will forage some ingrediants on the day on our certified organic site. We can make products to sustain us and to take home, deciding collectively and for individual use on the day. We might for example make teas, syrups or balms.
All materials are provided. Please wear clothes that can carry marks, and bring a cushion or knee pad if needed. Bring food to share for lunch.
There is some limited accommodation on site for an extra fee and free camping. The site toilets and a shower, is wheelchair accessible and we have an all terrain wheelchair should you need it.
We can offer reduced price tickets once we know we can cover our costs with ticket sales.
Caroline Perkins is a Yorkshire-born Neurodivergent artist with a Master of Art in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a first-class BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art. Her practice is centred on creating abstract figurative works that explore memory, emotion, and spirituality, forming a unique visual language that merges myth and personal narrative.
Jane Acton is a Lancashire born ethnobotanist with BSc Plant Biology for University of Wales Bangor and MA Environmental Anthroplogy from Goldsmiths. Her work is focussed on bringing people to plants and helping us to reclaim our intellectual heritage of intimate plant knowledge and understanding.
These two friends met while delivering early intervention and prevention services to the most vulnerable families in Cornwall.