Creative Explorers Outside

Irlam & Cadishead's 75th Festival - 2025

From April - August 2025 the Creative Explorers focused on daytime, decor, festivals / community celebrations and parades 

The group made giant flowers, bunting, a cardboard backdrop and decorated umbrellas as well as experiencing puppeteering, storytelling and performance workshops in preparation for Irlam & Cadishead's 75th Festival over the August Bank Holiday weekend.

Creative Explorers Outside is a continued professional development (CPD) programme for people interested in learning more about event planning, management and creating content for cultural events. 

This project is supported by the Place Partnership Fund, through Arts Council England and The National Lottery, in partnership with Salford City Council.

Middlewood Locks Fest - 2025

The group were also part of Middlewood Locks Fest in May 2025, working with artist / maker (and one of the Creative Explorers) Janine Walker to make a giant goose puppet (and smaller goslings), with Jamie Lee Wainman to make bunting out of recycled plastic and supporting Austin Hewitt with mindfulness walks. This involved taking part in workshops in advance: another two members of the group Gemma Hemmingway and Pam Pickard also delivered activities on the day, and at Swinton Sounds a few weeks later.

Big Heart Little Hulton

Between October 2024 and February 2025 people who live, earn or learn in Salford took part in the Creative Explorers Outside programme focusing on night, light and fire. As well as lantern making sessions, photography walks and visits to light nights and projection mapping the group attended the AGM of Community Little Hulton as part of a site visit before designing and delivering a nocturnal fire installation to celebrate the opening of their new Pavilion.

Produced by Walk the Plank

Creative Explorers: Aaran, Chloe, Cristina, Gemma, Jo, Melissa, Pam, Sylvester, Tracey

Walk the Plank facilitator: Carrie English

Following an open call out in October 2020 to curious creatives and outdoor enthusiasts based around the Salford area, and building on the Fire Garden project in 2017, we invited a group of 20+ artists, local residents and park volunteers to join the free course and engage in a mix of digital workshops in larger groups, and smaller in-person learning sessions.

The Creative Explorers Outside continued personal development (CPD) was designed for people who are interested in or have experience of:

- Arts, culture and heritage, particularly with a focus on participation

- Green spaces and the environment/gardening/conservation

- Making things happen within your community

- Learning, developing or sharing creative skills

In the lead-up to Christmas, we led a series of sessions including an introduction with Liz Pugh, a banner-making workshop with Charlotte Dearman, telling stories with your smartphone with Imran Azam and uncovering stories and creating audio with Dan Steele. The course continued again in February, culminating in a fire drawing workshop at Cobden Works at the end of March 2021 to mark 12 months since the 1st lockdown was announced and implemented (the original idea was to hold an appropriately distanced sharing event in the park but this wasn’t possible due to pandemic restrictions). This was filmed as a record of things to share with participants. In addition to the in-person fire drawing workshops with Carrie English and Peter Finegan, online sessions focused on:

Sense of place/ placemaking/ researching local history with Paul Hassall (Eccles & District Local History Society), Carole O'Reilly (Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies, University of Salford and author of The Greening of the City, Sarie Mairs Slee (Head of Salford's Culture and Place Partnership) and Kate Charnock (Programme Co-ordinator, Place, Salford City Council)

Inclusive as well as diverse practice with Venture Arts (we worked with Venture Arts to support an artist involved with their organisation to engage in this project), DIY Theatre, Age Friendly Manchester and The Whitworth (Early Years and Cultural Park Keeper)

Elaine Okoro, a writer involved in the project, had the idea of writing a poem to include with the film and recording the text in different languages. Watch the outcome here:

Banner-making session with Charlotte Dearman design/info sheet

Creating audio session recording with Dan Steele

Nature, Beauty and Masks: a poem by Elaine Okoro (in Bengali, English, Farsi, French (Congolese) and Urdu)

Created by Walk the Plank with Salford City Council. Funded by Heritage Lottery Fund and Salford City Council. Priority was given to including artists and residents living or working in Salford.

As part of the Rediscovering Salford project,  young people worked alongside sound artist Danielle Porter to develop recording skills, interview park users, engage in phone nostalgia and capture the noises of Spring in and around Peel Park!