Arts Council England: Giving voices to the LGBTQIA+ community

Artist Aimee Blease-Bourne has worked with youth groups in Monmouth and Hereford to create Queering the Wye, a project aimed at giving voices to LGBTQIA+ people living in the region. Capturing their experiences in rural communities, the groups created art cards depicting diversity in nature, along with podcasts and soundscapes. Aimee tells us more about the project...

 

 

I’m a writer and audio-visual artist with 20 years’ experience working in the community with young people. I have a passion to weave alternative histories about people, place and nature, and I love exploring complex concepts and helping others to understand them. My focus over that time has been investigating those connections through creative, counter-cultural and exploratory experiences. From creating community groups that help protect ancient sites to community mapping projects, I utilise my diverse skills such as videography, graphic design, writing, interviewing and scrapbooking to connect local communities with local landscapes.

As a queer woman living in a rural landscape, I understand first-hand how isolating it can be to feel different in the heteronormative countryside. In 2021, I read articles about how the Covid-19 pandemic had led to even more feelings of isolation amongst the LGBTQIA+ community and recalled my own experiences of internalised shame regarding my sexuality and gender expression.

The opportunity came up to become a Creative Community Champion with the Wye Valley River Festival, which brings artists, communities, and environmentalists together to co-create work that reflects on all aspects of nature and the issues that we face.

 

 

Out in the community

I had an idea to create a project called Queering the Wye, to explore connections between LGBTQIA+ people and nature, giving people a platform to share their voice and create archives for other LGBTQIA+ people to access. The Wye Valley River Festival saw promise and potential in the project and appointed me as one of its Creative Community Champions and supported me to develop this commission.

The first question within the initial stages of the project was what were the needs and wishes of the community within the geographical area. I began exploring safe spaces and community connections within the area and quickly realised there were very few services and physical spaces available to LGBTQIA+ people in the area. As a result, my desire was to create an online presence for people from the area so they can share and access stories from other people in the community.   

Thinking back to that isolation during the pandemic, it reinforced for me how much more visibility urban queer communities have within the media. Often LGBTQIA+ people move from the countryside in pursuit of community and designated safe spaces, such as bars and clubs.

"The idea of the countryside as largely heteronormative exists not only within queer communities but also in science and culture. We want to challenge this and shine the light onto rural queer communities and stories."

We are weaving together the geographically separated communities and individuals across the Wye Valley by interviewing LGBTQIA+ people and creating a digital archive made by and for our communities. We are challenging assumptions that the rural space is heteronormative and this in turn will help people develop a deeper sense of belonging in the rural environment.

We see community being both geographic or location based as well as communities of interest or identity. Diversity and inclusion are guiding principles of the work which, in our rural locations, can have additional challenges.

Part of this has been making an LGBTQIA+ podcast with youth groups, exploring different experiences of nature as defined by queer people in the Wye Valley. Queer to us is a collective and creative term used to describe the LGBTQIA+ community. We are giving queer people, who are often marginalised, a space to discuss issues that affect them. We connected with people and communities from three counties along the Wye River: Monmouthshire, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, creating a web of interconnectivity. The podcasts have been a fantastic way of establishing not only the themes and issues young people want to talk about, but also the artistic and research skills they may have and want to develop.

 

 

Drawing a line between identity and nature

In April, we ran our first LGBTQIA+ Ally Gathering for young people from Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. Here we developed an environmental stewardship program and aimed to nourish the souls of folk who have been made to feel like they don’t belong.

We utilised skills such as fire building and other naturalist knowledge to rekindle relationships with the natural world. It’s increasingly empowering to learn survival and earth-based skills - it provides a sense of peace in an uncertain world. We questioned perceptions of the natural world and reframed them based on sexuality and gender. The natural world does not have binaries: nature, like the river, must take its course. It is fluid and flexible. Like gender and sexuality, nature has a depth of diversity.

This led onto creating our 'Queer Nature Cards' with non-binary queer artist Brontë Fae, from the Wye Valley, who provided the illustrations, while I researched natural queer connections by contacting local scientists to uncover queer secrets within the landscape. The cards are designed as nature ID cards and used as discussion and creativity prompts.

Our queer nature cards have gone down a storm. We’re exhibiting them at pride festivals in the region and offering them as resource pack for schools, colleges, youth groups and other community groups. We’ve published four podcasts which are available on Soundcloud and will soon be releasing our archive tapes, which feature full interviews with the participants so far. I have also been asked to write and perform queer nature poetry, inspired by this research at queer safe spaces at festivals over the summer of 2022.

 

 

There has so clearly been a desire and need for this project, so we’re planning to extend it, creating new aspects and build our archives, as well as leading more participatory workshops in nature for young LGBTQIA+ people and allies. Here’s to 'queering’ even more rural areas.