Education | Posted on July 4th, 2025 | return to news
Bournemouth school pupils help to create art installation
Pupils from Malmesbury Park Primary School were involved in the production of an installation for September’s Inside Out Dorset festival.
Visitors to Moors Valley Country Park in September will be able to enjoy a new sound art installation which has had input from children from a Bournemouth Primary School.
Dorset-based artist Lorna Rees, of Gobbledegook Theatre, is creating her latest immersive sound-work, Canopy, for this year’s Inside Out Dorset festival of outdoor arts, which runs in various locations across the county from 12 to 21 September.
Canopy will see 24 sonic seed pods suspended from trees on a trail at Moors Valley Country Park and Forest at Ashley Heath. Each seed pod will house one of 24 different human responses to nature with contributions from a range of people including scientists, artists, folk musicians, arborists and Year 4 children from Malmesbury Park Primary School.
“The workshop at Malmesbury Park was wonderful, so inspiring,” said Lorna. “There’s this amazing hidden woodland there that we had an incredible time exploring.
“We had our listening hats on with the ears cut out and the responses from the children were so pure, so magical, completely untouched by the distractions we as adults fill our lives with. We spoke a lot about how we can be a good ancestor, and look after our trees for the future. We are custodians and one day we’ll pass that on to the next generation.
“We live in a very digital world, a very indoors world, so anything that gets us out into the open and into the realm of the physical is a good thing. I hope Canopy is part of that.”
Lorna’s work, which she tours nationally and internationally, is frequently inspired by the environment and climate emergency.
“I first heard about this at the age of 11 – it was called the greenhouse effect in those days – and I’ve been campaigning about green issues ever since,” she explains.
“I knew the answers then and they’ve not really changed, but we haven’t made anywhere near enough progress, so the hope is that the young people of today can meet that challenge. In the meantime though, we as grownups have to do our bit as well, to inspire them to make the difference.”
And at the heart of her work – and activism – are the landscape and communities of her home county, Dorset.
“The reason I make work for the outdoors is that it is seen and experienced by people who might not buy a ticket or go to a theatre. It means I meet so many different people and have the most fantastic conversations with them about all kinds of things – that’s the strength of Inside Out Dorset.
“It is such a joy to be involved because we live in a wonderful place and it is deeply inspiring to make work in the Dorset landscape then take it on tour all over the country and further afield.”
Canopy can be seen and listened to at Moors Valley Country Park and Forest from Saturday 13 September until Sunday 21 September. It is supported by Activate for Inside Out Dorset, Arts Council England, Forestry England, Dorset Council, Cultural Hub and the National Memorial Arboretum. Lorna’s workshop with Malmesbury Park Primary School was enabled by the Cultural Hub.
She also hosted workshops at Christchurch Junior School, St Katharine’s CE Primary School in Southbourne, and St Ives Primary School.
Inside Out Dorset is an international festival of free-to-see outdoor arts held every two years. This year’s typically diverse and inventive programme also includes a new Giant for the Dorset landscape, the county’s response to the international River of Hope arts-based learning project, four astonishing performance pieces from the Catalan region in one of Dorset’s most iconic villages, and an amazing, site-specific promenade performance against the backdrop of a Georgian seafront.
Full details can be found at https://activateperformingarts.org.uk/whats-on/inside-out-dorset/.
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