From 2018 to 2025, co-directors Laurel Gallagher, Isla Telford, and Jenny Harper led Urban Wilderness CIC, bringing art, play, and creative collaboration into communities across Stoke-on-Trent and the Midlands. This archive preserves a record of their projects, partners, and impact.
Winter Wastelands brought together creative responses from across Stoke-on-Trent during the winter lockdown of 2020/21. Urban Wilderness CIC commissioned artists and communities to explore connection, wellbeing, ritual and resilience through public art, clay, poetry, digital portraiture and creative rituals.
Read MoreBy a Thread is a textiles artwork by illustrator Becki Kremer, combining hand embroidery and felt on transparent netting. Installed temporarily in Central Forest Park, the work reflects on the relationship between nature and humanity through a quotation from Wordsworth’s Lines Written in Early Spring.
Read MoreThe Weight of Things is an outdoor sculpture by David Bethell, hand-carved from polystyrene and covered with fibre-glass, sand, and paint. Installed in Keele Woods, the floating rock sculpture evokes hope and despair simultaneously, inspired by Rene Magritte’s 1953 painting Clear Ideas. The work encourages reflection on impermanence and resilience in challenging times.
Read MoreOur Youth Grows in a Wasteland is an audio drama project by Potboiler Theatre exploring young people’s experiences of being outdoors in Stoke-on-Trent. Through collected stories, audio plays, and a verbatim account of the city’s first Black Lives Matter protest, the work amplifies youth voices and local activism within Hanley Park.
Read MoreDiverse Landscapes is a digital photography project by Adina Lawrence, exploring heritage and identity through outdoor portraiture in Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire. Models wore outfits reflecting their cultural backgrounds, colour-matched to natural surroundings and photographed with minimal processing to highlight authenticity and connection to place.
Read MoreTaking Up Space brings together Black women from Staffordshire to reclaim green spaces through walking, dance, and poetry. Initiated after the 2020 lockdown, the project culminated in dance and poetry performances filmed in Hanley Park.
Read MoreA series of artist commissions exploring how lockdown reshaped our relationships with local green spaces across Stoke-on-Trent — turning wastelands into places of imagination and possibility.
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