Creating new myths
with the Land and Each Other
An interview with Becca Gill, Artistic Director of Radical Ritual
What drew you to the Nature Calling commission?
The brief asked for something deeply connected to landscape, history, and community participation. That’s exactly what Radical Ritual does. It wasn’t about delivering an artwork to a community – it was about co-creating something with them. That distinction matters.
I wanted to explore how myths help us make sense of the land, and how we might build new ones together. As Nick Hayes says: “What we have is not ownership, but belonging.”
So I designed Consequences – a large-scale, collaborative artwork shaped by folk traditions, surrealist methods, and community storytelling. It’s essentially a giant game of Consequences, written across the landscape.
What inspired the work?
A sense that we’ve lost many of the stories that once helped us live in relationship with nature. I wanted to invite people to make new ones – rooted in their lives, voices, and landscapes.
The ideas came through walking the chalk downs, listening to communities, and thinking about impermanence. This work is designed to be large in scale but leave no trace. Like footprints on the land.
What does this particular landscape mean to you?
Cerne Abbas is full of contradictions. The Giant is mythic and strange, but the land around him is shaped by centuries of control – feudalism, religion, enclosure.
The Giant himself has been used for many purposes – from folklore to advertising. But the landscape also holds traces of resistance and reinvention. That tension is where this work sits.
What’s the outcome of the project?
A large-scale participatory artwork created with multiple communities and revealed in stages —at Cerne Abbas, Corfe Castle, and Yeovil. It’s made with biodegradable, locally-sourced materials – chalk, plant dyes, charcoal – so it leaves no physical mark, only memory.
It includes neurodiverse young people, global majority communities including refugees and asylum seekers, adults with learning disabilities, school children, and others. There will be poems, music, and ritual as part of the unveiling.
The aim is to create a new shared myth – something people can carry forward.
Why the title Consequences?
It comes from the surrealist drawing game where each person adds a part of a figure without seeing the whole. It mirrors how landscapes, histories, and communities are shaped—layered, unpredictable, collaborative.
It’s also a reminder that our actions – ecological, historical, social – have lasting effects.
Why are natural, accessible landscapes important to you?
Because they carry memory. Because access to them is uneven. Because who gets to walk freely and who gets told to keep out still matters.
Art can help challenge that. It can open up conversations about access, ownership, and care. We want to create awe in ways that are democratic – not just reserved for a privileged few.
What have you learned from the process so far?
That materials matter – chalk, woad, and alder all have stories to tell.
That people are hungry to connect – to land, to each other, to story.
That co-creating something big, together, can be powerful and joyful—even when dealing with complex themes like ownership, exclusion, and legacy.
What has the community response been?
Warm, curious, generous. People want to be involved. The game element helps — it’s accessible and playful — but the conversations it opens up are deep. The level of interest and engagement has been really encouraging.
How has working with National Landscapes shaped the work?
It’s allowed us to work on a larger scale, with deeper connections to land and community. It’s also grounded the project more firmly in place. This isn’t just about making art about nature – it’s about working with it.
Anything else?
Consequences is about process as much as outcome. It asks: Who owns the land? Who writes the stories? And how might we do both differently?
The project invites people to take up space, connect with each other, and imagine new myths – together.
As one participant put it:
“It’s about leaving something behind, but not in a way that scars the land — in a way that nurtures it.”
