Photography credit – Ben Knight
The FUTURES Festival also supported projects that connect communities to University research. Artist and workshop facilitator, Hannah Mumby, was joined by researcher Hannah Hayes to explore creative mapping of flood risk in the Exe Estuary, while Exeter Seed Bank investigated the health of local community growing spaces.
The FUTURES Sparks Programme is designed to build on the festival’s aims of fostering collaboration and engagement between academia and the public. Supporting the development of research that relies on the expertise of both researchers and local communities, Sparks invites collaborative projects to share their work on a wider stage.
Presenting at our Pop-Up Curiosity Shop, artist and workshop facilitator, Hannah Mumby, and researcher Hannah Hayes expanded upon their work for their Creative Arc project exploring Topsham’s flood risk. The ‘Our Creative Climate Maps’ stall invited visitors to explore their artistic side through map-making, while engaging closely with the local implications of climate change. Since the FUTURES Festival, the project team have taken this work further, to their Exeter Custom House exhibition, ‘Waterscapes and Floodscapes: Past, present, future’. The exhibition tracks the history of the Exe estuary, and uses a range of maps and artistic media to explore the impact of flooding on local communities, and is free to visit until Sunday 7th December.
Alongside this project, Exeter Seed Bank hosted a workshop linked to their work on community growing spaces, commended as a “welcoming” and “great community event” for those who came to visit. Their work aims to investigate the health of our natural environment by assessing soil health in key areas for community plant growth – particularly in areas where food is grown. As well as their popular seed packing activities, their workshop for the FUTURES Festival invited new audiences to explore their Community Soil Testing Kits, which they also featured in a stall at our Pop-Up Shop.
Both of these projects combine University research with community benefits, encouraging members of the public to get involved with research activities in new and hands-on ways. We look forward to seeing the continuation of this work going forward, and the positive impacts on our local landscapes.
FUTURES is a free festival of discovery which takes place across venues in Bath, Bristol, Cornwall, Devon, Exeter and Plymouth, funded by the UKRI.
