The latest exhibition from We Feed The UK celebrates a trail-blazing intergenerational nature restoration and regenerative farming project unfolding at the Penpont Estate in the Bannau Brycheiniog, Wales.
We Feed The UK is a national storytelling campaign pairing award-winning photographers and poets with the UK’s most inspiring food producers. These radical collaborations are raising awareness of the food system’s potential to positively address climate change, the biodiversity crisis and social injustice.
Award-winning photographer Andy Pilsbury has spent 6-months visiting and photographing Penpont and the partnership of local young people, landowners, farmers, ecologists and charity Action for Conservation that is bringing biodiversity back to more than 500-acres of land, while continuing to produce high quality food and honour Welsh farming traditions.
The Penpont Project Partnership combines the energy of youth with the experience of age to respond to climate change, food security and biodiversity loss in the Welsh uplands; a context in which nature restoration and farming have, wrongly, been depicted as in opposition to one another.
Since 2019 the project has welcomed hundreds of young people and community members to Penpont to plant more than 10,000 native trees, restore 1.5km of hedgerows, institute conservation grazing across 80-acres, restore lost wetlands and establish new habitats for otters, barn owls, newts, grass snakes, and more.
In this special exhibition, Andy’s beautiful images of life on the land are complemented by the lyrical Welsh poetry of Ifor-ap-Glyn, former National Poet for Wales, and paintings by renowned artist and Penpont resident Robert MacDonald.
Rowan Phillimore, Co-Director of The Gaia Foundation, said, “70% of the UK is farmland. The potential for this to become the place where we support biodiversity, sequester carbon and address so many of the other problems we are facing is enormous. The arts have the power to speak to the heart. Apathy is such a big barrier, and hope activates.”
The exhibition is open to the public on 22 – 23rd June at Penpont Estate, and 22nd October – 18th November at Found Gallery in Brecon.