The Soil Project is an annual invited artists commission at Butler Gallery. This commission, inspired by our move to the historic Evans’ Home in 2020, invites artists to create participatory projects that engage the public to connect deeply with the world around us and beneath our feet. Artists are free to explore the many possibilities of connecting with and through soil - with the interconnected life processes that nourish healthy soil and our food systems, with the traces of our history that are embedded into the soil by previous generations, or with more poetic notions of soil as a record of human and non-human activity.

In 2020, Butler Gallery invited Monkeyshine to work with us on The Soil Project. Monkeyshine presented Myth Maker for the first time; an immersive live arts experience, at Evans’ Home over a weekend in September 2020. 30 people took part in this event, in family sized groups. Myth Maker invited audiences to consider themselves as story tellers, connect to the world, make rhythms with their bodies, commune with our ancestors and explore the power of touch painting.

“This piece was made in direct response to our own experiences of living within a global pandemic. We drew on personal experience and reflective practice work, that we had made while living in lockdown, as well as observations from wider society. We searched for the essence of what we felt we had lost and explored what we were missing. Creating a piece which celebrated, touch, connection, our elders and a deep need to be in tune with the earth.”

Monkeyshine, 2020


Mollie Anna King interviewed Monkeyshine for the Butler Gallery podcast in Autumn 2020.
Have a listen here.


More about Monkeyshine:

Monkeyshine makes theatre and arts experiences for adults and children.

We are dedicated to exploring ways in which creativity, story and play can be used to investigate, acknowledge and celebrate what is fundamentally important: our connection to each other and our planet.

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