The Green Man at Lightpool
He goes by many names, called upon each May to welcome the spring. But, when spring has sprung and winter is upon us, where is The Green Man while he waits to be called?
The Green Man is a new work produced by Blackpool-based community arts organisation Aunty Social, constructed entirely out of household plastic waste and litter collected from Blackpool’s beaches. Workshop participants from across the local community came together in collaborative sessions to imagine his realm, bringing it to life through an exploration of light using traditional and contemporary crafting techniques and plastic waste.
Supported by artist and activist Lucy Wright, we looked to folklore and its practices as a way to gain a better understanding of our relationship with the natural world. We explored the Green Man’s role as a symbol of humanity’s relationship with and dependence on nature and asked:
How has our obsession with consumption affected The Green Man?
Instead of describing plant life, does the term Green now connect to and argue for climate consciousness and sustainability in our everyday lives? Reducing and recycling our plastic waste in order to reinvigorate nature’s abundance
Here the Green Man stands in his wintry plastic abode, waiting for us to call on him to rewild our urban environment.
Community engagement & workshops
In collaboration with each other, our textile group Knittaz With Attitude, Queer Craft Club, and Home Education art groups engaged in research, exploration and crafting to bring The Green Man to life for Lightpool 2024.
Along with our in-house groups, Aunty has welcomed the public to help create the installation at open craft workshops.
Students of Park Community Academy have also worked to collect their used water bottles to be brought back to life within the installation.
The installation is a culmination of responses to the research and development, with a strong focus on the seasonal changes we would expect to see through the winter months and a play on the work green, and our use of discarded plastics within the piece. All materials for this installation have been found, donated, saved from landfill or repurposed.
Credits
Workshop Leaders: Joe Booth, Samantha Mawdsley, Karl Hanrahan, Josh Ford
Lead Volunteers: Elaine Cheeseborough, Helen Kay, Helen Rodger
Collaborative Artist: Lucy Wright
Soundscape and Audio Edit: Adam Shaw & Luke Williams
Musical Director: Phil Fairhurst
Vocals: Electric Pink Voices
Frame Construction: Junction 4 Productions
Special Thanks: Jonathan Kirkham-Molloy. A student of Park Community Academy Sixth Form who collected plastic bottles to be used within the project for our project.
Dusking
Lucy Wright is an artist based in Leeds, UK. Her practice sits at the intersection of folklore and activism, often using as source material her 10+ years of cited research into lesser-known contemporary and female-led folk customs.
Believing that present understanding of ‘folklore’—including its current resurgence in popularity—is often both limiting and exclusionary, her work is concerned with exploring folk as an agent for resistance and change—speaking to the culture we create for ourselves and its radical potential. Via her ongoing interventions in and with existing folk practices, and playful invitations to participation —especially to those currently sidelined/excluded from the narratives and ‘territories’ of folk (incl. e.g. rural places, public spaces and a sense of shared national heritage)—her work asks, ‘what are the new traditions—of care, of equity and interspecies kinship—we need for living together on our broken planet?’
Lucy joined Aunty Social in early October to work with our volunteers and workshops to help guide us through our understanding of folklore and the concepts of The Green Man. Whilst in Blackpool we also explored Lucy’s practice and her nearly invented tradition; Dusking.
Conceived as the counterpart to the morris dancing that takes place on 1 May marking the arrival of summer, Dusking takes place instead on 31 October.
“At Dusking we ‘dance the sun down’ while honouring the equal gifts of rest, reflection and replenishment associated with the darker months of the year.”
Credits
Artist: Lucy Wright
Production: Joe Booth & Catherine Mugonyi
Photographer: Donna Hannigan
Date:
24 March 2025