Drop-in workshop for all ages with Zoe Childerley & Beckie Leach McDonald

Join us for a day of ocean themed activities for Remembrance Day for Lost Species, imagining and collecting stories of the ocean environment, and of extinct and mythical sea creatures.

• Make posters and zines
• hear myths and legends of the sea at 12.30 and 2.30pm
• record your sea stories on camera
• commit to a positive action for the ocean

The ocean is a place of wild wonder, full of amazing creatures, fantastic magical beings and incredible people. This is a world full of eight-tentacled octopuses, chattering dolphins and spiky sea urchins; of sea goddesses whose fingers became sea mammals, of merpeople who guard the treasures of the deep, of the beautiful Selkie people who can transform into seals, and of Steller’s Sea Cow, the species we are honouring on this year’s Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

After the workshop, why not stay and join our procession for Steller’s sea cow? We’ll take a sculpture of this amazing extinct animal on a walk to the beach at dusk and gather for a short remembrance ritual.

Featured image “Manatee Resting” by Jan Harrison for Lost Species Day by courtesy of the artist

About the artists

Zoe Childerley has been working as an artist using photography, drawing and mapping for over 10 years. She also lectures at Brighton University and has a strong record in community projects. Her work is developed by interaction with different communities, reflecting a vision of the world concerned with identity, belonging and our relationship to the land and its stories. Zoe has exhibited nationally and internationally and undertaken numerous commissions and residencies in Italy, California, Colorado, Nepal, Jamaica and across the UK.

Rebecca Leach McDonald is an artist whose practice brings together storytelling and learning for sustainability into participatory experiences that explore what it means to be human within a fast-changing world. She is a graduate of the MA Art and Science at Central Saint Martins, the Deep Listening Institute and the Westcountry School of Myth. She has recently run projects at Tate, Tate Exchange, V&A, and has worked in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Global Generation.

This workshop also forms research for the CONNECT hospital redevelopment public art programme. Commissioned by Photoworks in partnership with Willis Newson for Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust to create a major new collection of photographic artworks within the redevelopment of Brighton’s Royal Sussex County Hospital to open from 2020.