Urban Wilderness CIC - Artist-led Programme
At Urban Wilderness CIC, we have always worked at the meeting point of art, environment and community. In the Balance extends this work explicitly into an artworld context — making visible the critical, conceptual and relational frameworks that underpin our environmental action.
What is In the Balance?
In the Balance is a space for artists and audiences to sit together in complexity. It resists binary thinking — hope/despair, action/inaction, nature/city — and instead invites us to remain present in the uncomfortable, in the unfinished, in the trouble.
In a time of ecological crisis and cultural fragmentation, we believe art does not offer neat solutions. Instead, it creates conditions:
for reflection
for reframing
for collective imagination
for feeling differently about the environments we inhabit
Each session is shaped and led by the invited artist, grounded in their own practice and processes. The programme has included a wide range of formats: guided walks, photography encounters, creative workshops, immersive audio experiences, films, scratch performances, long-table debates, reading groups and open artist talks.
What connects these varied forms is not format, but depth. Every session offers insight into the thinking behind the artwork — the long narrative that intertwines an artist’s life with their practice. These gatherings foreground process over product, revealing the research, questions and lived experience that sit beneath the visible work. In doing so, they bring us together through a shared sense of humanity.
Through artist-led dialogue and encounter, the programme situates Urban Wilderness CIC within a lineage of relational and socially engaged practice. It demonstrates how environmental action can also be aesthetic action — how changing perception is itself a meaningful intervention.
Sessions Archive
For full details, please follow the individual event links:
Women’s right to roam, storytelling and motherhood: Sophia Hatfield
Portraits & Places: Adina Lawrence
Spacious Heritage: Natalia Kasprzycka
A Walk, Words & Works: Jon Paul Green
Taking Up Space Long table: Gabriella Gay
A Journey Through Audio Storytelling: Kat Hughes
Museum of Possibilities: Urban Wilderness CIC
Artist Talk and Film Screening: David Bethell
Where are the trees? Where are the birds? Raphael Daden & Leanne Cunningham
Ritual Connections: Immaculate Sisters
Symbiotic Artworks: Tracey Meek
Fawley Film & Walk to Berryfield Hills: Ben Anderson
Why This Matters
Urban Wilderness CIC operates at the intersection of performance, environmental activism and local heritage. Through projects such as Pig Walk Parade, we embed creative practice directly into the social fabric of communities. In the Balance strengthens the conceptual spine of this work.
If the Pig Walk Parade embodies carnival, collective joy and subversion, In the Balance offers a quieter counterpoint — a space where artists articulate the thinking behind such acts and where audiences engage with the questions that shape them. It aligns with relational aesthetics, where art is understood as a situation rather than an object, and with a broader view of environmental stewardship as cultural practice.
Here, environmental action is not framed solely as protest or policy. It is framed as perception. As relation. As shared atmosphere.
Holding the Tension
The ecological moment we inhabit does not resolve easily. It carries urgency and uncertainty in equal measure.
In the Balance does not attempt to smooth these edges. Instead, it creates room — room to stay with difficult questions, to listen carefully, to encounter perspectives that do not immediately align. It encourages a slower attention to how we think and feel about the environments we share.
Rather than separating art from action, the programme affirms their interdependence. The way we perceive shapes the way we act. Cultural change and environmental change are entangled.
Action Research & Ongoing Impact
Although this phase of In the Balance has now concluded, it was conceived as a reflective piece of action research and continues to inform the direction of the company.
Academic researcher Rebecca Leach has worked alongside us throughout the programme to evaluate the sessions and critically reflect on the impact of our approach. Her forthcoming report will deepen our understanding of how artist-led dialogue can shift environmental awareness, strengthen community connection and shape future practice. A link to the full report will be added here once published.
In the Balance may have formally closed as a programme, but its questions — and its influence — remain active within Urban Wilderness.
