Fermynwoods Contemporary Art is an educational charity that supports life through art by commissioning innovative and meaningful ways for artists to engage with audiences, in public spaces across Northamptonshire and online. Founded in 1998, Fermynwoods collaborates with national and international artists, partners, schools and businesses.
We work out of an office space in Thrapston with activity and experiences taking place in locations across Northamptonshire, particularly in the Rockingham Forest area. We have commissioned exhibitions in locations ranging from woodland spaces to castles, from canal tunnels to shopping centres, from online to outer space!
We deliver exciting and bespoke educational experiences led by artists. These can take place in school; at our idyllic outreach centre, Sudborough Green Lodge in Fermyn Woods, surrounded by the largest and richest biodiversity grassland in Northamptonshire; online, or in the plethora of unusual locations we pop up in.
Our long standing flagship education partnership provides weekly full-day artist led workshops and experiences for Key Stage 3 and 4 students from the CE Academy who are excluded from mainstream education and dual registered, led by a range of national and international artists.
We also work with mainstream and SEN settings, delivering unique artist led experiences for each partner.
Workshop activity comes from a range of national and international contemporary artistic practice and covers disciplines as varied as drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture and ceramics, to taxidermy, electronics, sound art, music production, film making, broadcasting, digital art, installation, robotics and more.
Previous workshops have seen children work alongside professional artists to make work for public exhibitions; turn a staircase into a piano; infiltrate billboards in town centres; generate sounds from Marmite sandwiches; create augmented reality animations from school display boards; launch and film their sculptures 90,000ft above the earth’s atmosphere; design, build and race an electric powered car against an international field; turn a classroom of Primary children into a 3D printer; work with a Space Scientist inside an inflatable Planetarium installed in the woods to contrast the thermal imprint of distant stars with cups of tea; and more!
Please get in touch to find out more.