EPIKS are supporting an art exhibition that encourages visitors to fall in love with nature and the natural spaces in Kirklees.  The exhibition will be located in space provided by Huddersfield Temporary Contemporary on the Piazza in Huddersfield Town Centre from Monday 9th May – Saturday 14th May 2022. The exhibition is the brainchild of senior lecturers from the University of Huddersfield, Fiona Cheetham and Claire McCamley. The art works will be supplied by local people coupled with accounts of their experiences of the natural places and spaces in Kirklees.

EPIKS will have a stall at the exhibition to illustrate their own work to enable access to greenspaces around the rivers and waterways of Huddersfield and ways to get involved in improving places for people and wildlife in Kirklees. There will be a guided walk starting from the exhibition at 2pm on Wednesday 11th May, when EPIKS staff will walk from town to the River Colne to highlight the amazing wealth of nature available to us just minutes from Huddersfield town centre. To book your free place on the walk through Eventbrite click here.

Fiona and Claire explain why they have set up Loving Nature in Kirklees and invite you to take part:

We are hosting a People’s Art Exhibition with fellow nature lovers, and we are looking for people to join us. The idea behind the Exhibition is to share our love of nature with visitors in the hope that they might also fall in love with nature and the natural spaces and places that surround us here in Kirklees.

We believe that our personal creations (most likely photographs, but feel free to also submit a painting, sculpture, soundscape, or poem) can reach out and ‘speak’ to others about nature and the natural world on a more emotional and visceral level than scientific papers and articles in the mainstream media on the environment and climate change. In fact, Melissa Harrison, an English novelist and nature writer, captured it perfectly in a recent interview when she said that people need to love the natural environment in order to think about caring for it. We intend to focus the exhibition on our love of local nature within the Huddersfield/Kirklees area, broadly speaking. We would like not just to acknowledge our amazing moorlands, landscapes, parks and waterways but to share our personal experiences of these spaces and places with other local people. We therefore envisage our People’s Art Exhibition as being first and foremost a celebration of the natural features of Kirklees and its surrounds. Allied to this, we would also like to acknowledge the importance of caring, preserving and even improving local nature for future generations.

If this is of interest, you are invited to undertake the following:

Using whatever creative process and means you prefer, produce a maximum of 3 artworks that tell a story about your personal experiences of being in nature in the local area;

What is your personal story? Is it connected to the beauty, awe and wonder of nature and/or to the benefits that spending time in nature provide to you/your family/friends etc;

Decide whether you have a specific message for others. Some of you may prefer to simply share your personal experiences and let visitors to the exhibition respond in whatever way they choose. Others of you may want to encourage visitors to seek out and discover local places and spaces to experience nature, or to share the benefits of spending time in nature.

Provide a short biography to accompany your artworks with your name and the title and/or brief explanation of your works.

Submit your photographs and digital copies of your painting/sculpture etc to us at:

We will arrange and cover the costs of printing and mounting photographs for the Exhibition. For other types of artworks we will make arrangements with you via e-mail for submission and display.

Please be reassured that your artworks remain as your property and they will be available for you to collect at the end of the Exhibition.

You don’t need to be a professional artist, or even feel particularly confident about your artistic creations; your love of nature is the most important thing for this Exhibition.

Download a flier for the guided walk here.