Sites of Resilience

Over the summer, MAKE Room took root in Craft Wood CIC, a 12-hectare working woodland in Amber Valley. Together with Craft Wood’s steward Thomas Erskine and his Thursday group, we (Glassball Studio artists Cora Glasser and David Ball, alongside curator Claire Tymon of Local) explored what it means to build a “room” in a place that is already alive with history, ecology, and memory.

The Sites of Resilience residency unfolded across five days in June and July, with a midsummer walk from Alfreton to Craft Wood in partnership with Make/Shift, and concluded with an intimate sharing event in August. At its heart, the project asked: what does it mean to create safe spaces for art-making within and alongside a woodland that already offers sanctuary to so many human and more-than-human communities?

Our temporary MAKE Room structure - a sculptural form made from several modular frames of reclaimed wood and fabric, bound with straps - was both fragile and adaptable. The series of 4 shapes came from looking at the (repetitive) spaces / gaps in between the trees in this man-made woodland. These (empty) spaces formed where we could make work collectively. The woodland is more than what you can see and touch.

Set within the trees, it invited people to step in and out, discussing if the pre-existing space had an outside and inside. It carried an inherent tension: how do you add something into a woodland already full of form, colour and sound?

As artists, we were interested in the agency of the room: not as a fixed installation, but as a tool for gathering, listening, and testing ideas. The structure could be dismantled, carried, and rebuilt elsewhere within the wood. Its mobility highlighted the possibility of resilience - a reminder that creative and community spaces, like ecosystems, thrive when they can adapt.

During the sharing event, participants helped to move and reassemble the room, experiencing first-hand how collaboration, negotiation, and play can create a sense of collective ownership. The act of re-making and capturing the interactions with connected conversations along the way, the new iteration became more fragmented and less clear as to an enclosure of space.

The residency also produced a makeshift kitchen and library: a parachute canopy transformed into a classroom/living room where books, notes, and sketches could be browsed. Around the fire, we warmed chapatis, shared a vegan curry, and exchanged stories. Food and conversation, as ever, became the simplest but most effective tools of connection.

We were joined by fellow artists and friends - Anthony Sheppard from The Wireworks Project, Khadijah Carberry of Generous Waste, Andrea Kemp from Green Spring and Simon Woolham (aka The Frog) - each contributing responses through dialogue, reflection, and performance. These contributions expanded the residency into something porous: part artwork, part research, part gathering.

As curators and artists, we valued how the event felt: safe, open, and collaborative, without pressure for consensus. Each participant carried away their own reflections and questions - seeds for future growth.

Two provocations from MAKE Room’s wider research guided our conversations:

What if Nature was in charge?
If the trees decided town planning, if the rivers set the rules… how might our priorities look different? If we used Nature to measure time, such as we experienced in the woodland by noticing new fungal growth that developed over the course of a night.

Use What You Have
Working with reclaimed wood, cardboard, and found fabric, our process embodied this provocation. Resilience came not from pristine materials but from resourcefulness, repair, and reuse. As one participant put it: “It’s about seeing potential in the overlooked.”

These provocations created space for reflection: on resilience, sustainability, and how artistic practice can mirror ecological cycles of renewal.

Reflecting on this residency, we return to the question of resilience itself. It is not about permanence, but about adaptability, generosity, and openness. At Craft Wood, resilience looked like:

- A co-space that could be built, dismantled, and rebuilt.

- A canopy that could become both shelter and classroom.

- A meal that turned strangers into collaborators.

- A woodland that holds centuries of natural and social history, now animated with new stories and connections.

But perhaps most importantly, resilience revealed itself in the act of making. For us, making is not an extractive process - it is not about taking from a site - but about creating space for connection, conversation, and collaboration. It is a way of giving back: to nature, by working with what already exists; to ourselves, by slowing down and paying attention; and to others, by opening dialogue and building something together.

This ethos extends beyond the woodland. The online resources we’ve been developing - links, periodicals, and the MAKE Room methodology - aim to support these making processes while also considering the sustainability of environments, cultures, and communities. The methodology is emerging as a model of engagement, one that uses accessible and creative tools to help people explore how they live with, and within, their local ecologies.

As one book in the MAKE Room library reminds us, “To build is to dwell.” (Heidegger). The act of shaping even a temporary room in the woodland was a reminder that to dwell is not simply to occupy, but to be in relationship: with place, with each other, with the materials at hand.

Looking back, we might also borrow the words of artist-activist Lucy Lippard: “Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political.” These insights echo through the residency: that resilience is not only ecological, but cultural, relational, and deeply felt.