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Grand Union
Education

‘Students of Nature – The City as a Classroom’

Education

‘Students of Nature’ is an alternative/otherwise learning programme led by artist Exodus Crooks.

‘Y: the symbol of man’ (2023), Exodus Crooks. Image courtesy of Katerzyna Perlak for ICF.

In April, Grand Union and artist Exodus Crooks invited applications from artists in the West Midlands for ‘Students of Nature – The City as a Classroom’, an alternative/otherwise learning programme.

Alongside Exodus, the group (Students of Nature) will use the city as resource and starting point to experiment with how we can use elements such as earth, water, wind and sun within nature as teachers, to develop new ways of learning together.

The group consists of 4 emerging artists, researching and shaping a new curriculum that responds to the idea/context of ‘The City as a Classroom’: Gugan Gill, Susie Olczak, Rumbidzai Savanhu and Mads Washbrook.

‘Students of Nature’ will formulate through a series of learning days using different educational techniques, readings and practices to then develop a series of public lesson plans to share.

More information will be added to this page as the project develops.

About the Artists

Gugan’s work grows out of garden practices and the rhythms of everyday life. She draws on embodied knowledge and shifting landscapes, where slowness and care become ways of learning about our surroundings, echoing Ursula Le Guin’s emphasis on the life story. Here we begin to understand the ways we shape, and are shaped by, the world around us. This carries through into her tree advocacy work at Birmingham TreePeople, and her collaborative, community-rooted practice at Artefact, where reciprocity shapes how we live and work alongside wider ecologies. Gugan’s practice speak to a quiet connectedness, weaving together: filmmaking, books, textiles, gardening, drawing, publishing, musing, drinking tea, sitting, walking, tending, growing, cultivating.

Susie Olczak is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on sculpture. Her work considers ideas of contingent making and adaptation in relation to climate change and asks the viewer to look again at the world.  Her work has been shown internationally in Berlin, Japan and the United States. She has exhibited around the United Kingdom, attended residencies in Finland and in Panama and Chile with La Wayaka Current. She has also been commissioned to produce public artworks by BBC Scotland,Charles Saatchi at the Big Chill Festival, and the National Trust.

In Cambridge, she has produced works for The Institute of Astronomy and the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as for King’s, Jesus, and Peterhouse Colleges of Cambridge University. In 2018 she participated in a workshop with the RCA at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and was awarded a scholarship to attend the Summer Art Academie in Venice. In 2018, she also received the Villiers David Travel Grant for a research trip to Iceland. In 2016, Susie Olczak was a bursary award winner at the Royal Society of Sculptors. In 2019 she showed in the Ingram Collection Purchase Prize Exhibition and in 2020 she completed the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award residency and exhibited the work at Standpoint Gallery.  In 2021 she showed work in Landscape Portrait. Then Now at Hestercombe Gallery and took part in the Zabludowicz Masterclass. In 2023 at Tremenheere Gallery, in 2024 at White Conduit Projects and The Lightbox, in 2025 at School Gallery, Folkestone and 2026 at Coleman Projects.

Rumbidzai Savanhu is a Zimbabwean artist, writer and facilitator with an interest in other mediums such as film, set design and textiles. They work primarily as an illustrator for children’s publishing, editorial publications, arts in health and comics. Recently, they have been developing my socially engaged practice with collaboration community-led co-creation projects for schools, hospitals and community centres. As a multimedia artist, they explore themes of identity and hidden histories, teaching drawing, painting, creative writing, music, animation and zine making.

Mads Washbrook (she/they) is multi-disciplinary storyteller, who weaves narratives across filmmaking, writing, performance, printmaking, and painting. She makes art exploring artefact-based histories, and how we interpret objects through the narratives and social mythologies, which are used to contextualise them within archives, collections, and museum spaces. They are primarily concerned with learning about artefacts through altern ative methods, such as digitisation, and translating their visual identity across physical and temporal dimensions. She makes art for people interested in folk histories  and practices, alternative museum practices, and museum decolonisation. Mads was awarded the Mike Holland Prize (2022), The Sir Whitworth Wallis Fellowship (2023-24), and is currently artist-in-residence at Contemporary Other, through the GU x BCU Studio Programme.
An image of an open lake, shrouded by weeds and shrubbery. The sky overhead is blue and cloudy, while the surrounding trees are shaded brown and green. Ducks bob along the water.

Exodus Crooks

A landscape image of a pale brown hand wearing several bracelets and silver rings holds a small red-pink reddish above a table made of dark brown branches. Upon the table there is a variety of plants and fruits such as apples and flowers.

The Growing Project