Artist Katie Fowlie, Artist Educator and Forager was commissioned to deliver Remembering Together Fife. The project was designed as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and offered a wonderful opportunity to meet and co-create with communities across Fife while trying to process this period which touched all of our lives.
Community feedback influenced how the funding should be spent, with a focus on investing in people, promoting wellbeing and connection through creative, engaging workshops and events which celebrated Fife’s landscape.
- Twenty-two accessible workshops were delivered across Fife, reaching around 700 participants. These workshops aimed to improve mental well-being, reduce feelings of isolation and diminished self-confidence, connect people with nature, and encourage positive habits and acts of kindness.
- These skills were also taught to community groups, volunteers and NHS staff, to enable these skillsets to be cascaded to a wider audience.
- Collaboration with Green Action Trust (GAT) on the ‘River Park Routes’ project, they are planning to plant large areas of wildflower varieties to encourage biodiversity and mental and physical well-being through enhanced green spaces. The species included on our behalf have been chosen specifically for the areas of grassland and wetland with the plants’ associated Floriography meanings and symbolism. The plants will bloom annually, serving as a living, gentle reminder of the pandemic and the project’s positive impact. This will serve as an additional permanent legacy and collective non-verbal expressions of emotions whilst providing a place in nature to actively process the pandemic. GAT’s project is being implemented in phases, so the projection is that planting will begin at some point during 2025 onwards.
PROCESS The project’s final art piece was shared with schools, colleges, youth organisations, NHS Fife, libraries and a community groups contains across Fife. 500 copies of this boxed publication are being gifted across Fife, a digital publication will be accessible online until 2030.
- PROCESS – Working camera obscura, housing the box contents
- INLOOK – Handbound book, project overview
- OUTLOOK – Handbound book, containing simplified ‘how-to’ instructions
- LIBRARY of LANDSCAPE | PROCESS – Botanical Inks from Fife’s Landscapes
- FLORIOGRAPHY of FIFE | PROCESS – Flowers, retracing lockdown walks
- CONNECT – Paint-Your-Own Postcards for creating botanical inks and anthotypes
- ROOT – 8 organic wildflower seed packets & floriography meanings
- Hidden compartment containing brushes, glass vials for storage, glass pipette dropper, cloves for preserving, shell palette/inkwell foraged along the Fife Coastal Path
This handbound object will become a co-created visual diary of sorts, depicting images of participants’ responses created from foraged and natural materials, with additional ‘how-to’ links for others to freely access.
Utilising the language of Floriography, by drawing upon the meanings and symbolisms attached to plants and flowers, will enable an expression of participant’s emotions and feelings gathered during this engagement, in an understated and non-verbal way.
The publication marked Covid –19 pandemic by recording the experiences of the participants in a handbound collection of images, reflections, words, and fragments gathered to form a collective expression of love, loss, strength and renewal shared by communities across Fife.
The Remembering Together Fife project has made significant strides in fostering community wellbeing and creative expression while promoting sustainability and lasting environmental impacts.
This project has been met with overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants, who have expressed enthusiasm and appreciation for the workshops and creative kits.
Remembering Together Fife has successfully engaged with the community, fostered well-being, and created unique creative outputs. This project’s impact will continue to be felt through the publication “PROCESS,” the wildflower planting, and the ongoing availability of resources online.
Downloadable Resources Recipe Cards
- Anthotypes (with a creating dyes as part of the process)
- Chlorophyll Photography
- Suminagashi.
- Botanical Inks and Dyes