Two staff members from Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) are among four artists who exhibited in Venice this September as part of In and Out of Bounds, an Arts Council England-funded project connecting the landscapes and communities of the New Forest and Venice.
Vanessa Collingridge, Course Leader on the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design, and James Elliott, MA Photography (Online) Programme Leader, are two of the four artists behind the project, alongside Tom Hall and Stephanie James.
In and Out of Bounds is an ambitious cross-cultural and cross-generational project exploring what it means to live within, move through and belong to places defined by boundaries. It brings together two seemingly distant, yet conceptually connected landscapes: the New Forest in the UK and Venice in Italy.
Both locations can be understood as living museums, distinctive environments shaped over centuries by people, history, culture and careful stewardship. They're places of extraordinary beauty and strong identity, but also face contemporary pressures surrounding tourism, access, opportunity, changing populations, heritage and the environment.
The project began with Forest Bounds in the New Forest, where the four artists worked with communities through workshops, conversations, research and creative activity. Working alongside young people and community groups allowed the artists to explore personal experiences of place, identity and belonging, including perspectives that can sometimes sit outside more familiar narratives of the Forest.
These encounters provided starting points for new artworks exploring themes including cultural diversity, stewardship, personal journeys, age, ecology, memory and our relationship with the landscapes we inhabit.
The project has since travelled to Venice for its second phase, Venice Bound, bringing the research, conversations and artworks generated through the New Forest into dialogue with another bounded landscape, a historic island city with its own communities, identities and environmental challenges.
Vanessa's contribution, Waymarkers and Memorable Places, developed from participatory workshops with young people in the New Forest exploring their relationships with the landscape. Through collaborative mapping and drawing, participants considered personal landmarks, memorable places, unofficial waymarkers and the routes they take through the Forest. Conversations explored ideas of freedom, escape, isolation, belonging and the boundaries that shape young people's experiences of place.
These encounters became a starting point for Vanessa's own artistic response. Working through drawing, mapping, printmaking and material processes, her work explores the New Forest as a collection of memory points and in-between spaces, considering how personal experience can create multiple narratives of the same landscape.
James’ project involved working closely with Forestry England’s wetland restoration team documenting and responding to their ongoing work restoring waterways across the forest. His focus for Venice was a year-long project at the Coppice of Linwood in the north of the forest, where he was able to record and respond to the site from the cutting and clearing of the space (which began in October 2025) to the civil engineering team filling and recreating the old meandering watercourse.
James describes how he naïvely considered the New Forest to be a wilderness, free from human intervention, when, in fact, it's a carefully managed space that reflects important values such as stewardship. James’ responses encompassed large scale photographic prints and video to present the forest as a breathing, changing, morphing entity and an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of the past generations who have cared for and dwelt within it.
For Vanessa and James, exhibiting internationally while continuing their roles at AUB also creates an important connection between professional creative practice and arts education. Their involvement demonstrates how active research, exhibition, collaboration and community engagement can feed directly back into conversations with emerging artists and designers.
“For me, teaching and making are closely connected," says Vanessa. "Working with students continually challenges me to think differently about materials, processes, research and ideas, while continuing my own practice means I can bring current, real world experiences back into the studio.
“In and Out of Bounds has given us the opportunity to work with communities in the New Forest and then take those conversations and ideas into a completely different international context. What has been particularly important is that the project isn't simply about two landscapes; it's about the people who live within them, the stories they tell and the different ways we experience and remember place.”
At its heart, In and Out of Bounds is about people and place. It asks whose stories are heard, how places change, what we choose to protect and how art can create opportunities for different voices and experiences to be shared.
