Wells-next-the-Sea: Wayfaring

In May 2018 along with Norwich and Norfolk Festival, the Norfolk Coast Partnership and Holkham Estate worked with AndNow to facilitate a large-scale public art project on the highly sensitive site of Wells Beach, creating an opportunity to reach out to new audiences and talk about the liminal beauty and sensitive nature of the landscape of the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Wayfaring was inspired by both the area’s landscape and the ancient route way of the Icknield Way, a path walked over thousands of years that follows the chalk escarpment, it is punctuated with henges and meeting places, and stretches from the Norfolk coast to the plains of Wiltshire and then on to the coast in Dorset, long ago it extended across the North sea, Dogger bank and beyond, and in the south down to the european mainland, a free flowing artery of exchange and connection.

Working with locally sourced materials, volunteers and passing community, Art Now: created an installation that audiences could move through, investigate and contribute to. Wayfaring invited visitors to think about movement and migration, as well as how we arrive at, understand, inhabit, protect and then leave an outdoor space.

On the final weekend, fire,gentle illuminations,music and performance transformed the installation in a rousing celebration of being there as the sun went down, as day turned to night.  Wayfaring was premiered in Norfolk, then traveled on during 2018 to create three other site- specific works in places that also encompassed the Icknield Way: