We are pleased to announce that Gemma Garwood has been commissioned for a new creative health project that engages with residents in Tendring.

Gemma’s project, Storylines: Remembering Roads to Healing, will use folk lore, practice, art and knowledge as a tool to build connections, honour traditions and imagine healing futures for Tendring folk from working class and Romani/Traveller backgrounds. By digging into memories, folk tales, the history of local fairs and festivals, folk remedies, and traditional stopping places (atchin tans), the project aims to find historical connections and shared experiences between these communities.

The county of Essex is still more wild and rural than we might expect and the district of Tendring is no exception to this. Within living memory so many of us would have found our livings within the landscape. And we would also have relied on transient communities to help prepare, maintain and harvest it, keeping the wheels of the rural economy turning.

With the current renaissance in Folk lore, art and practice there is an insistence that “Folk is for everyone”. This renaissance is also creating its own economy, with its own opportunities. How do we make sure that the Folk remain at the heart of it? And how do we ensure that folk knowledges are not only collected ethically but also remain accessible to the people that they belong to in the first place… Celebrating, sharing, developing, but not appropriating.

Over the next few months, a short series of community workshops and free drop-in creative activities will pop up around Tendring, inviting residents to try folk art and cultural practices with local connections, and to contribute their own stories and knowledge.

This will then be showcased at an event and in a zine that will also map traditional stopping places and sites of shared significance in the local area, co-created with project participants. The zine and map will offer an account of local shared memory and knowledge, as well as encouragement to visit and experience these places, and try out the uncovered healing and nourishing practices contained within its pages.

“When you grow up rooted firmly in the soil of a place. When you are fascinated your whole life by its history and folklore, It is so easy to think that you know that place inside out. I am delighted to have been given this opportunity by Essex Cultural Diversity Project to dig deeper into that soil, and uncover some of the meaningful connections and stories in danger of being buried. I cannot wait to offer free and welcoming creative opportunities for local Roma, Travelling and Working-Class folk to gather, to make and to share. A chance to begin remembering the shared experiences and healing knowledges of lives lived alongside, and together, in Tendring. Exploring these connections and holding this creative space would not be possible without the inclusive vision and insightful support of Essex Cultural Diversity Project.” Gemma Garwood

About the Artist

Gemma Garwood is an East Anglian site-specific live artist, born and bred in Essex. Her lifelong obsession with myth, folklore and women’s histories stoked a relentless passion for exploring the hidden and colloquial mysteries of our significant places. She tells stories about people, seeking the individual within larger social and historical narratives and celebrating the ways in which people, places and stories collide and collude in landscape and imagination.

Gemma has been digging into the idea of creative ‘cunning’, exploring the power of ritual actions and the imagination to build inviting and collaborative spaces. Here we can hold space, discuss the storytelling of our own personhood and share ways of moving through the world, through grief and trauma and victory, that are overtly and compellingly personal.

This manifested through 2021 in a triptych of video works for Magical Women, the development and delivery of a ritual walkshop for Sudbury Walking Arts Project, and in OTHERLAND, a deep exploration of Essex that she collaborated on with Lucy Gayler. In recent years she has also been the youngest Town Crier in the UK and started UNFAMILIARS, a multidisciplinary arts zine/event platform.

In 2022/2023 Gemma collaborated with Bethan Briggs-Miller (and other artists) on a large scale site specific project for Cudmore Grove, Mersea Island. Throughout the project they developed an “Anticipatory Folklore” together with the local community. Creating songs, stories, characters and rituals to record and celebrate this place, so close to the edge of disappearance. She has been Creative director of the East Anglian Folklore Centre since the summer of 2024.

www.eastanglianfolklorecentre.co.uk
www.instagram.com/east_anglian_folklore_centre

Image Credit: OTHERLAND by Gemma Garwood and Lucy Gayler

Storylines: Remembering Roads to Healing is made possible through a commission from Essex Cultural Diversity Project supported by Arts Council England.