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Peat Fest: The Oxford Stage (2024), a series of community-engagement workshops, Lye Valley Nature Reserve & Bullingdon Community Association, Oxford, UK.
Peat Fest: The Oxford Stage was a two-day peatland-themed festival engaging with the unique ecology of Oxford’s Lye Valley Nature Reserve. Over the course of a weekend, participants were invited to explore the Valley’s landscapes, plants, and histories through creative, hands-on workshops led by Oxford-based artists Usha dapur Kar, Caroline Vitzthum, and Helen Edwards. Each workshop contributed to a collaborative tapestry that evolved as the festival unfolded—a living record of shared experiences, tactile discoveries, and creative responses to this rare urban fen habitat.
The event formed part of Peat Fest, an international series organised by RE-PEAT, a youth-led collective advocating for peatlands. The wider Peat Fest programme celebrates “all things peaty” through learning, art, and play—building community around peatlands and raising awareness of their ecological importance. The Oxford Stage brought these aims into direct dialogue with the Lye Valley, inviting participants to deepen their connection with the site while contributing to a collective artwork rooted in place.
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Fen, mud & monoprint with Usha dapur Kar
This workshop invited participants to immerse themselves in the colours, textures, shapes, and sounds of the Lye Valley. A guided walk through the reserve provided an opportunity to gather inspiration – from the delicate details of plants to the rich variation of soils underfoot. Returning from the walk, participants created earthy images on the collaborative tapestry using painting, monoprinting, and collage techniques.
In a tactile and playful turn, they also made their own paints using soil samples collected in the Valley, blending pigment directly from the land into their creative process. To set a wider cultural frame, Usha introduced the art of the Gond people, former forest dwellers from central India, whose intricate, nature-inspired imagery celebrates the interconnectedness of living systems. The emphasis throughout was on making together – working in community, sharing ideas, and valuing the process as much as the outcome.
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Reed, reed, reed the weave with Caroline Vitzthum
In this experimental weaving workshop, participants worked with common reed (Phragmites australis), gathered from the Lye Valley. As a dominant, fast-spreading species, the reed is regularly cut back by local volunteers to maintain biodiversity and allow other species to thrive alongside it. This harvesting provided the raw material for the session.
Participants explored the creative potential of all parts of the plant—the stems, leaves, and seed heads – experimenting with weaving techniques and combining reed elements with collage to integrate them into the growing tapestry. The workshop also considered the living nature of the material: as it dries and ages, it will shift in texture, colour, and form, slowly moving through its natural cycle of change and decay. In this way, the tapestry continues to evolve beyond the moment of making, carrying the rhythms of the Valley within it.
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Grass puppet theatre with Helen Edwards
Drawing on bundles of grasses, sedges, reeds, and wetland flowers gathered in the Lye Valley, participants created plant-based puppets animated by the Valley’s own gestures and movements. Listening closely to how each puppet might move, they brought these forms to life through collective dance, movement, and improvised storytelling.
The workshop was inspired by Helen’s travels in Java and the traditional art of Wayang Suket—meaning “ghost of the grasses” or “grass shadow puppet” – a performance tradition that conveys both folk narratives and Javanese wisdom for living well. In the final stage of the project, the grass puppets will be used to create a shadow play performed in front of the collaborative tapestry, weaving together the stories, discoveries, and imaginative journeys sparked by the workshop.