On Queer Land was a participatory movement-based project developed with and for the queer community living in the Welsh borderlands. The project was designed and produced by Jess Tanner as part of her MA in Arts, Health & Wellbeing in response to a lack of dedicated queer spaces in the rural area. Drawing on her own queer and rural lived experience, this research explored how limited LGBTQ+ visibility can affect the ability to build community and sustain queer health and wellbeing across rural areas. The project was in partnership with Field Notes / Nodiadau, Maes, an emerging rural collective of queer makers exploring what it means to build belonging and community through slow, gentle and land‑based publishing practices across the Wye Valley.

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The project drew on counter-storytelling (Delgado, 1989), a liberatory, community building practice rooted in Critical Race Theory. Widely recognised as a framework for supporting socially marginalised groups to make sense of the oppressive narratives surrounding their lives, On Queer Land aligned with the following key counter-storytelling tenets: of centring marginalised lived experience, strengthening networks of solidarity, and fostering understanding among wider audiences. By exploring these principles through a nature-based movement and art-making approach, the project shed light on the many ways LGBTQ+ communities adapt, resist and flourish within rural spaces and places where queer lives are often overlooked.

In honouring the diversity of queer experience and expression, the project adopted a multimodal art-making approach, inviting embodied engagement across creative movement, sensory nature prompts, and guided reflection. Together, these practices created space for multiple forms of participation, and for innovating more inclusive spaces, practices, and narratives through which queer and rural experiences could be understood. Through this approach, participants were invited into gentle reconnection with themselves, their bodies, and their local landscape. By centring often-overlooked perspectives, the project created space to reclaim the rural environment as a site of queer presence and belonging, and opened possibilities for more flourishing queer and rural futures.

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Read on to explore the groups reflections on belonging, solidarity, and relationships between body and landscape as they emerged throughout the workshops.

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With thanks to Aimee Blease-Bourne for supporting this project, to Fawn Fae for their photographic documentation of the workshops, and to the generous creatives and practitioners who took part, including Bronwen Rashad-Wilson, Carli Ma, Caroline White, and Rachel Adams.