Art and adders

The Adders Up project includes an arts programme designed to inspire audiences by the beauty and wonder of the world of adders.

Community arts grant bursaries 2025-2026

The North Pennines National Landscape’s Adders Up project is working with artists to deliver adder-themed engagement opportunities for schools and community groups with two commission bursaries for 2025-2026 and two micro-bursaries for artists to develop their creative practice by exploring the natural history and cultural importance of adders. The community arts grant bursaries are funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Northumbrian Water Branch Out Fund.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025-26 Adders Up community arts grants:

Commission bursary 1 – Anna Harding and Hollie-ann Coleman

Anna Harding is a local artist and designer who has worked with community members of all ages and abilities across County Durham for over a decade. Her practice focusses on creative community engagement, mentoring early-career artists, and producing large-scale props and installations for parades and public celebrations.

As part of the North Pennines Adders Up project, Anna is creating two large-scale adder puppets with fabric bodies beautifully decorated by community participants. Through the project, local people will learn about the importance of adders in our local environment while exploring wax-resist fabric decoration techniques. Schools will also take part by designing adder-themed lanterns using printmaking methods to light the procession.

Anna is collaborating with professional dancer and choreographer, Hollie-ann Coleman of Weardale Together, who will lead community workshops to develop choreography and performance, helping participants learn how to bring the adder puppets to life through movement during the procession.

Hollie-ann Coleman is a community arts organiser and creative producer based in Weardale. Through her work with Weardale Together she brings people together through creativity, culture and connection, running Root & Branch Community Café, craft sessions and community celebrations such as the annual Wassail. Through the North Pennines National Landscape’s Adders Up project, Hollie will collaborate with Anna Harding to create two adder puppets that will debut at the next Wassail, leading a procession and performing a dance inspired by the territorial “adder dance” of male adders. Schools and community groups will help decorate the puppets, leaving a lasting legacy for future local events.

Commission bursary 2 – Ronan Devlin

Ronan Devlin is an artist & designer based in the North East of England, making work across print, screen and multi-sensory installation. His work focuses on audience engagement and looks at connection, emotion, place and sense perception.

Adder Patterns is a participatory moving image artwork exploring the beauty, mystery, and fragility of the adder through the concept of pattern. Patterns are visible in the adder’s striking zig-zag dorsal markings, but also extend into its behaviours, seasonal rhythms, ecological relationships, and its presence in myth, story, and cultural imagination. By working with schools and communities in the North Pennines, the project will explore how these patterns — physical, behavioural, and symbolic — can be translated into creative forms, helping participants and the public who experience resulting artworks to engage with and more deeply understand the adder, its natural beauty, behaviours and challenges. The final outcome will be a moving image ‘montage’ artwork and a series of digital vignettes (of pattern, text, filmed footage and corresponding audio), all structured around the adder’s physical skin pattern — using the zig-zag as a system for editing, rhythm, and composition. In this way, the adder’s own body becomes both subject and structure for the artwork.

Micro-bursary 1 – Carole McCourt

Carole McCourt is an artist based in the North Pennines, her practice weaves together landscape, heritage, and community through walking, textiles, and creative participation. Her recent commission for the Land of Lead and Silver programme—Smelters Shawl—brought together local craft groups to explore lead mining history through knitted storytelling and public exhibition.

For the Adders Up micro-bursary, Carole is developing Adder Hat – Knitting the Serpentine: a striking new design inspired by the adder’s zig-zag markings and movement across moorland. This wearable artwork invites conversation around biodiversity and conservation, transforming fear into fascination through the slow, tactile rhythm of knitting.

Micro-bursary 2 – Holly Magdalene Scott

Holly Magdalene Scott is an artist and amateur naturalist living in the rural expanse of the North Pennines. A self-taught printmaker specialising in relief printmaking techniques, she is known for her well-observed, sensitive linocuts of British wildlife. Long since spellbound by birds, insects and animals, Holly ‘s work seeks to convey her enchantment with the natural world.

An ‘accidental printmaker’, the artist was drawn to the enduring ageless process of relief printmaking, finding it the perfect medium to collate information from both the natural and inner world. Borne from a strong connection to the land and inspired by memories of chance encounters with the wildlife within it, her intricate prints touch upon folklore and seek to evoke the timelessness of animal lives. Through careful observation and rendering of detail, Holly champions mundane and maligned species, elevating the overlooked and highlighting the beauty in the familiar.

Holly’s prints are created without a press, printed by hand in small varied editions, and hand-coloured- imbuing each one with the unique character of it’s subject.

Community arts grant bursaries 2024 – 2025

The North Pennines National Landscape’s Adders Up project offered four community arts grant bursaries for artists working in the North Pennines National Landscape in 2024 to 2025, one commission bursary and three micro-bursaries. The community arts grants are funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and Northumbrian Water Branch Out Fund.

Adders Up micro-bursaries

The three micro-bursaries, for artists living or working in the North Pennines National Landscape with the primary focus on developing their creative practice through the priorities of the Adders Up project, were awarded to Anna Osborne, Dan Walls and Caroline Steven.

Anna Osborne is a felting artist that lives and works in the North Pennines National Landscape. Felting has been her creative outlet for many years, but it wasn’t until 2019 and the arrival of a dog in the house, that she began to think of it as anything other than a hobby. The need to find a solution to the problem of ‘unfound’ tennis balls, drove her to experiment with humble and amply available local wool. It took many trials but she eventually created a felted, durable alternative to tennis balls which led her to ask the question: what else I could achieve with similar techniques? Being inspired by the natural local environment, she began making larger felted ‘rocks’ and ‘geodes’ as well as 2D art. Problem solving and experimentation continue to fuel this exploration. Anna will explore a variety of felting techniques to capture the texture and pattern of the adder in a series of 2D pieces.

Dan Walls is an eclectic mixed-media artist. He primarily produces large-scale murals through his business, Illumination Wall Art, while also producing work of varying media to both challenge and express his interests. He is passionate about the natural world and has a fondness for our native animals and folklore. Having never seen an adder in the wild, he has only ever heard stories about these fascinating creatures and, as such, they hold a mythical quality to him. This micro-bursary will expand his knowledge of the adder and adder folklore and through creative exploration of various media on a series of panels.

Caroline Steven is a printmaker, born in Northumberland now living in the North Pennines. She expresses herself in an intuitive, experimental and abstract way which is deeply influenced by human emotions. With this bursary she is producing handmade prints (block and monotype) to be displayed in a long rectangular form, emulating the form of the snake. She is exploring mediums and the various mythologies surrounding snakes identifying seven themes that resonate. The final work will consist of images inspired by the serpentine, exploring the colours, patterns, textures and forms of the snake as it appears throughout mythology.