By Sally Churchward.
As part of Southampton National Park City’s Urban Wild festival, Nazneen Ahmed Pathak and Yarrow Townsend are holding a free workshop: See, Sketch, Sew – Crafting a Slower City. We talked to Nazneen about the inspiration behind the event and how we can all slow down and notice nature on our doorsteps.
Flowers and shrubs filling front gardens. Weeds pushing their way up between paving slabs.
Swifts, swallows, wood pigeons, sparrows, crows, magpies and more swooping in the sky or out of sight, chatting with each other.
Parks with trees, foxes, insects and other invertebrates. Lime and plane trees growing out of pavements.
The inner city is full of life and nature, if you slow down and take a moment to really pay attention.
Children’s author and artist Nazneen Ahmed Pathak hadn’t realised just how much nature was on her doorstep in central Southampton until the Covid epidemic made her look at things differently.
“During lockdown we were doing our one hour exercise walk just around the immediate area.
“Because we were just focused on that area, we started to notice a lot more things. I remember this one garden in Bevois Valley we walked past which was full of borage which was covered in caterpillars and every day we would check on them as they got bigger and bigger.
“I don’t know if in a normal rhythm of our daily lives, rushing from one thing to another, we would have noticed them.
“It was extraordinary really and it made me think about how much there is living at the heart of the city and we don’t even notice it.
“Sadly there was a hedgehog that had been run over behind ours, right next to the Avenue and we thought ‘hedgehogs, here!’ It means we need to be better at looking after hedgehogs but we were really surprised.
“It made me really think – there’s a lot of diverse communities in the city centre and we can connect to nature on the doorstep, we don’t necessarily have to get in the car and drive to be in contact with nature. We can be right here in the city and still be aware of nature and slow down and pay attention.”
Nazneen is teaming up with another author-artist Yarrow Townsend (pictured below) for a family-friendly workshop as part of Urban Wild, See, Sketch, Sew: Crafting a Slower City, on May 23rd at Southampton Central Library.
It will be a slow creative workshop, taking a short sensory walk in the city parks, and learning how to stitch or sketch the things you find using Bengali naksi kantha techniques.
“Yarrow’s practice is also often about slowing down, noticing the sensory elements of nature and the outdoors and reconnecting young people and other groups to the sensory dimension – what you can see, hear, touch or smell, so she’ll be leading the walking element of the event.
“We’re based at Central Library and there’s the rewilded meadows there. We think by the end of May it will be quite an interesting space and we’re just going to look directly around us and see what is there and then do the drawing, writing and embroidery activities to translate what we have discovered,” explains Nazneen.
“The kind of embroidery I’m going to be sharing is a very simple form from Bengal which is where my family originates from. It’s very much about sustainability. It’s a type of stitching for quilts. It would have originally been for quilting together old saris with running stitch so they become bed quilts. Because the fabric would have been worn it would have been very soft and they would become softer as quilts and used and handed down, then repatched or decorated. So there’s this tradition of reusing, remaking which is very inherent in South Asian textile traditions, particularly in kantha, and it just seemed to work with the ethos of Urban Wild.
“Often the more decorative quilts or textiles are scenes of rural life and are people fishing or pounding rice into rice flour and there will be a river in the background all depicted through stitch.
“I thought ‘what if we translate that storytelling to our urban environment. What kind of ways can we use it for storytelling?’”
Participants will be collectively creating art on the day but Nazneen says she hopes there will also be a personal change for those taking part, with people seeing the value of slowing down and noticing the nature around them.
“”When we live in the city, it’s all rush, rush, rush. We’re always trying to get from A to B. We’re always trying to get so many things done and I’m so guilty of that but actually, what happens if we slow down? What happens if we walk instead of taking the car? What happens if we listen instead of maybe putting our headphones in? What do we see? What do we hear? What do we notice? And how does that make us feel in relation to our environment?
“Do we feel more responsible for it? Do we feel more protective? Does it make us think twice about littering? Does it make us do something about something that’s causing an issue in our local environment?
“That’s the bigger idea behind this workshop. It’s really a ‘what if?’. What if we’re not always rushing? What can we notice?
“Because there’s the idea that the inner city is concrete and nothing lives there, when actually there’s so much that lives with us and we don’t notice.
“I always remember my son, when he was five, we were in the city and he was really interested in dinosaurs and then really interested in birds, because he discovered they’re modern dinosaurs.
“He saw a tiny bird and said ‘Mama that’s a pied wagtail’ and I said, ‘Really, are you sure?’. He noticed it and he knew the name and I didn’t know. And ever since then, I’ve always noticed pied wagtails. They are very cheeky charming little birds.
“Sometimes our children notice things more than we do.”
Nazneen says everyone can reap the benefit of slowing down and connecting to nature in their neighbourhood, even if they can’t take part in the workshop.
She suggests going on a 20 minute sensory walk of your own local area, and noting what you can see, smell and hear that’s living, from plants in people’s front gardens to weeds in cracks in the pavement.
She adds: “What kind of birds live in my area? There might be quite a lot of wood pigeons, but I like them. What other birds can you hear? The sparrows, swifts, swallows. What can you see in the sky? What kind of shapes are there?
“All those questions you can ask yourself and you don’t have to take very long but you can take it slow.
“Then you can come back and there are lots of YouTube tutorials on kantha stitch if you want to stitch it into a record or you can draw it. You can use your phone, it’s a useful way to positively use your smartphone on your walk. Really zoom in on small things like a snail shell. If you look at a snail shell really carefully, you’ll see it’s almost a geometric pattern, so you can really explore that visually in whatever form you’d like.
“As soon as you start to notice, you don’t stop.”
- See, Sketch, Sew: Crafting a Slower City is taking place on May 23rd at Southampton Central Library. For more information, visit: community.nationalparkcity.org/events/see-sketch-sew-crafting-a-slower-city
- For more information about all of Urban Wild, visit community.nationalparkcity.org/spaces/17083031/events
- Article originally written for Southampton National Park City – Reimagining Southampton newspaper, which will be available at Urban Wild on the Common on May 24th for a suggested donation of £3. Reprinted with permission.
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