Men’s Journeys Through Landscape

Lines of the Weald: Men’s Journeys Through Landscape is a seven-month creative mental health project funded by the High Weald Nature and Community Fund and delivered by Fabrica. Working with men from Crawley, the project explores how photography, creativity and time spent in nature can offer different ways of looking at the landscapes around us - and reflecting on our own experiences within them.

Artist Phoebe Wingrove facilitated the workshops, working with the group guide them using activities to create these photographs that reflect individual encounters with place and form part of a wider exploration of identity, memory, recovery, grief and belonging. Tilgate Park and the wider High Weald provide both a setting and a source of inspiration with photography playing a part in encouraging participants' curiosity, confidence and playful approaches to looking. The landscape’s woodland, clay soils, industrial heritage and ancient routes offer parallels with personal histories: both people and places are layered, continually changing and shaped by what has come before.

Photography has provided an important thread through the project. Participants have taken cameras on journeys from Crawley’s urban environment into the greenery of Tilgate Park, using photography as a reason to pause, observe and pay attention to details that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

“The photo activity made me slow down and really look at nature.”

The exhibition brings these different perspectives together, with photography at its centre. Collectively, the works invite us to consider what changes when we slow down and really look at a place - and how looking outward at a landscape can also become a way of reflecting inward.

Lines of the Weald explores a feedback loop between looking, making and experiencing place. Photography makes this particularly visible. The act of taking a photograph encourages participants to slow down and pay closer attention to their surroundings. Looking more closely changes the experience of moving through the landscape; that experience influences the images participants choose to make; and those images can, in turn, change how the landscape is remembered and understood.

Other creative processes extend this loop. Materials gathered during walks become cyanotypes and prints; encounters with landscape prompt words and poetry; observations become images, objects and shared conversations.

There is also a loop between individual and collective experience. Participants bring their own memories and perspectives to the landscape, while spending time and making alongside others creates new experiences of place. Lines of the Weald considers landscape as something we continually respond to, interpret and remake through our own experiences.

Funded by the High Weald Nature and Community Fund and delivered by Fabrica.

The photographs exhibited are a selected range taken by the participants, using their smart phones, DSLR and a disposable camera.