We’re excited to launch Teaching Community, a summer creative workshop programme based in our Dartington studio, designed and led by a group of 4 diverse artist-educators. Over the course of July and August, we’re offering free art clubs exploring making, performance, dance and scent. The programme is guided by abolitionist practice - rooted in peer exchange and collective exploration - creating space for participants to use art as a tool for imagining new social possibilities.
You must sign up to the workshops before attending.
Teaching Community is a flagship project for Radical Ecology. Through it, we begin to explore how our beliefs in the worldmaking possibilities of art, can be translated into tangible methods and curricula for art education - methods we intend, in due course, to share as an open-source toolkit.
This summer you’ll have the opportunity to journey with…
Helena Lyons
Wowhaus
Art clubs for children aged 7-9 & their carers
Dates & Times: Monday 6th, 13th & 20th July, 3:30 - 5:30pm
Location: Radical Ecology Studio
Join The Wowhaus, and Radical Ecology, for three creative workshops for children and their grown-up, together. Through playful enquiry, creative expression, and collective collaboration, we’ll explore how perspective shapes our experience of the spaces we co-inhabit, revealing new ways of seeing, understanding, questioning and connecting with the world around us.
Sign up required: here
About the artist:
Helena is an artist and creative facilitator based in Devon. Originally from Ireland, she spent many years in Cork city and then London building a successful career in illustration and design, working at a senior level within the creative industries.
Alongside her professional practice, Helena developed a passion for sharing creative knowledge and skills, leading her into teaching and mentoring roles within further education. After becoming a parent, her focus expanded to creating inspiring and accessible artistic experiences for children, families, and communities, with a particular passion for the intergenerational experience.
Today, Helena works with local families, schools, the home-educating community, and adults, encouraging creativity through playful, engaging, and exploratory art. She is passionate about making art inclusive and accessible to all and believes creativity has the power to not only positively impact our personal well being, but to build and nurture connection within communities.
Riham Isaac
Where Do We Belong
Performance open laboratory for Adults
Dates & Times: Thursday 9th & Friday 10th July, 11am - 2pm
Location : Radical Ecology Studio
Join performance artist Riham Isaac for a two-day multidisciplinary performance workshop - an open laboratory where participants will work across movement, the body in space, material, and collective making, participants will explore questions of safety and belonging - not through discussion alone, but through experience, imagination, and action.
Where do we belong? What does it feel like to be safe - in a place, in a community, in your own body? Who decides what safety looks like, and for whom? What do we do when that sense of belonging is fragile, contested, or lost?
The sessions draws from Riham’s practice - which involves working with materials, installations, sounds, videos, scripts, and situations, and exploring how these forms can enhance the creative process.
No artistic background is required. What is needed is curiosity, a willingness to be present, and an openness to what the room makes possible together.
Sign up required: here
About the artist:
Riham Isaac is a Palestinian performance artist and theatre maker working across performance, movement, video, sound, and installation. Her artistic practice and her approach to teaching are inseparable: in both, she creates non-hierarchical spaces where people are given creative tools to explore their own stories, challenge dominant narratives and imagine alternatives.
Her work includes co-directing The Alternativity in Bethlehem (2017) with Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle and Banksy, featured in a BBC2 documentary; Stone on Road (2014) at the Qalandia International Biennale; and Another Lover's Discourse, commissioned by Belfast International Arts Festival and nominated as VAULT Festival 2023 show of the week. She holds an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Practice at the University of Exeter, researching the intersection of performance, land, and cultural resistance. Riham has designed and delivered workshops and training programmes at Birzeit University, Bethlehem University, Bard College, Dar Al-Kalima College, and with organisations including the A.M. Qattan Foundation, the British Council, and Belfast International Arts Festival.
Fatima Alaiwait
The Living Scentscape
Scent workshop for Adults
Dates & Times: Thursday 23rd & Tuesday 28th July, 11am - 2pm
Location: Radical Ecology Studio
What are some ways to connect with plants and local place? What stories are told, held, carried without words?
This workshop series invites people to explore ways of relating with plants and place through sensory practice, focusing on scent. Through shared creative inquiry with local plants, we will explore the expressive qualities of scent as an ephemeral, recurring and permeating language, that connect us with seasonality and diverse temporalities. We’ll also explore scent as a language and medium for storytelling. By the end of the workshop series we’ll have each created a small fragrance composition.
No prior experience is required.
Sign up required: here
About the artist:
Fatima’s work is guided by a desire to listen and relate with the more-than-human world in sensuous and intimate ways, with a particular interest in container technologies and poetics within the everyday. Her research explores how and what creative forms hold and brings to light complex threads of geopolitical, environmental, cultural and systemic entanglements. In doing so she questions how this can recognise unseen work, create the conditions for it to take place and support its continuation. Fatima works with cycles over time, where varied outputs continuously emerge. This has previously taken the form of working sensorially (e.g. with scent) which has led to writing, installations, food events and workshops.
Lerna Babikyan
Dancing Together
Dance movement for children aged 7 - 9 & their carers
Dates & Times: Wednesday 29th July, 4th, 12th & 19th August, 10:30am - 12pm
Location : Dartington Village Hall
In this playful workshop, children and their accompanying adults will dance, imagine, and create together. Inspired by stories, nature, and everyday experiences, we will use movement, music, and creative play to support curiosity, cultural learning, embodied learning, and meaningful connection.
Rather than learning dance steps, we will explore, discover, and respond to the world around us through our bodies.
No previous dance experience is required. Everyone is welcome
Sign up required: here
About the artist:
Lerna Babikyan is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and writer dedicated to the transformative power of movement and creativity. With a background in dance, adult education, dance pedagogy, and ecology, her artistic and pedagogic practice explores the intersections of identity, nature, language, indigenous cultures, and memory through somatic research and storytelling. Lerna continues to work with diverse learning communities across various age groups, weaving together ecological awareness and the healing nature of embodied arts via presentations and workshops in various local and international platforms.