A new site-specific artwork was installed in Berwick’s Castle Vale Park, bringing together art, plantlife and the experiences of local schoolchildren.

Offerings, by artist Anna Chapman Parker, was commissioned through a collaboration between the Friends of Castle Parks, The Maltings (Berwick) Trust and Prior Park Primary, following funding from Destination Tweed’s Community Grants Scheme, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with a further grant secured by The Maltings from the Hadrian Trust.

The project developed from the 2025 summer exhibition at The Granary Gallery of work by Cedric Morris, known as The Artist Plantsman. Workshops with Prior Park Primary pupils explored connections between art and nature and encouraged the children to engage closely with the parks around them.

Made from a series of Corten steel panels, and measuring nine metres wide, the new artwork has been fabricated by local specialists Old School Fabrications. Installed beside the Lily Pond in Castle Vale Park, just below Berwick Railway Station, the work offers a focal point to those passing through the park, as well as to visitors arriving or leaving by train. Corten was chosen as a resilient material that weathers to an appealing deep rust colour, sitting well within the greens of the park’s plantlife.

Offerings features four lines of laser-cut text set with a field of small, abstract, plant-like motifs. The sentences were drawn from observations by pupils at Prior Park Primary in a series of workshops for the project. The children were asked to record their recollections of being in the park, following a session focused on experiencing the park through sensory details of scent, sound and touch.

Looking through the pupils’ sketchbooks afterwards, Chapman Parker was struck by the clarity of some of their observations. Chapman Parker says: “The simple phrasing of the children’s recollections seemed to have a spacious, open quality that in itself invited reflection. Returned to the park and placed on the low wall, I had the sense of them as a kind of offering to passersby – perhaps also an invitation to sit on a bench yourself and take a moment to experience the park through your own senses.”

The title Offerings also reflects the artist’s interest in ex-voto objects – offerings fastened to walls and given in gratitude, devotion or testimony, a practice with a long history stretching back to ancient civilisations.

The plant-like motifs draw on a visual vocabulary that Chapman Parker has developed through her wider practice, as well as details of vegetation recorded during walks around Berwick.

Friends of Castle Parks helps Northumberland County Council (NCC) enhance and maintain three parks in Berwick – Flagstaff, Coronation and Castle Vale. Vice Chair of the group, Jackie Kaines Lang, said: “This project brings together a number of themes at the heart of Berwick life: art, nature and community. It’s been a joy to work alongside our partners in the project and to watch Anna engage creatively with the pupils of Prior Park Primary. The culmination of the pupils’ endeavours and Anna’s own reflective process is a stunning and original public artwork for Berwick. It has a sense of ‘hasn’t that always been there?’ about it, and harmonises seamlessly with the peace and serenity of one of the town’s most visited parks.”

The completed artwork adds a permanent creative element to Castle Vale Park, one of Berwick’s historic public parks, and reflects the collaborative nature of the project, bringing together local children, an artist, a volunteer parks group and a cultural organisation.

Sept 2026