Deep Encounters
Deep Encounters is a ‘Walking the Land’ artists’ project initiated in 2025 by Janette Kerr.
In the face of landscape change, 15 artists are engaging in Deep Encounters with small patches of land in very different areas/locations. Working simultaneously, but in different parts of the world, the artists are exploring urban, rural, wild, remote, community, loved and unloved outdoor spaces. Identifying each area of study via Google mapping / OS map / w3ws, each artist has walked the perimeter of their patch, tracing the outline, recording what it contains using photos, words, drawings, maps, sound etc.
Through sustained observation, creative practice, and dialogue with local people, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners, Deep Encounters explores how artistic processes can deepen understanding of place and co-create* its meaning, identity and future possibilities. *Here, co-create refers to the ways cultural engagement contributes to shaping the meaning and identity of place.
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Opposite her house, a small community apple orchard and wildflower meadow form part of Sara’s village green. It is a very familiar and well-loved dimension of her village and as such, she is fascinated to get under the skin of it. Sara would like to understand it in its ecological entirety. She will seek out and reinterpret the ecological relationships within this small, managed patch of land.
She is lured by the uncertainty of discovering new insights and surprises found in a place already known. Sara will also invite members of the community to share her journey, collaborate and help to dig deeper into this place.
Since beginning to experience this small patch of land through a different lens, Sara has observed the impact of the small apple orchard and the wildflower meadow on the natural fauna of the area. Both have been planted by the community, who love spending time in this place and harvesting the fruit to cook, eat and make apple juice. Creative experiments in early 2026 took the form of creating drawing and printing ink from the apple juice extracted from the windfalls on her patch of land.
Deep Encounters has been a reframing of Sara’s relationship with this community land. She is chair of ‘Greener & Wilder Blagdon Hill’, the team who manage the area and organise environmentally focused community events, wildlife and plant monitoring and other interactions on and in this space.
Deep Encounters is highlighting our interwoven relationships with the more-than-human world. Sara’s seasonal apple and walnut foraging on the site is now accompanied by a heightened awareness that she is not the only creature benefitting from the seasonal produce.
The wildflower meadow attracts pollinators and creates mammal habitats. Sara began to draw and film the activity of bumblebees. The drawings revealed their activity, industry, movements and relationship with the flowers.
October 2026
Sara’s investigations and research so far have taken the form of drawing, foraging, walking, photography, film-making (using her phone and a wildlife cam), sitting, ink-making, printing and painting.
Sara’s fascination with the impact which the apple trees, planted by the community over 20 years ago, have on the visitors to her patch of land, has grown during the project. Using a wildlife cam, she has observed how the windfall apples provide food for foxes, Roe deer, jackdaws and crows, who have become frequent visitors.
The sowing of the wildflower meadow in 2022 was undertaken in the hope that it would aid wildlife habitats and attract pollinators, which it has done very successfully. However, the planting of the apple orchard and walnut tree were done primarily for community benefit, without much consideration of the impact they might have on the more-than-human visitors to the Green.
As well as foraging for windfall apples, the foxes are digging to find edible roots and insects since the summer drought began. Sara has taken the holes appearing because of this, as an invitation to collect earth samples to make into paint. She has also made walnut ink from the walnut husks (brought to her patch by foraging squirrels) and experimented with walnut husk prints.
Her mindful foraging and processing of plant matter is strengthening Sara’s connections with this patch of land which she already loved. Since the autumn rain began, small fungi have started to emerge, apparently plucked from the ground by more-than-human occupants of the Green, but not eaten. Sara has collected them and created a series of spore prints.
