The words of Berwick schoolchildren have been turned into a new permanent artwork in one of the town’s historic parks.
Offerings, by Berwick-based artist Anna Chapman Parker, has been installed beside the Lily Pond in Castle Vale Park, just below Berwick Railway Station.
The nine-metre-wide work is made from a series of Corten steel panels featuring four lines of laser-cut text alongside small, abstract plant-like motifs. The words come from Prior Park Primary pupils, who were asked to record their experiences of the park through its scents, sounds and textures.
The project grew out of The Artist Plantsman, a 2025 summer exhibition at The Granary Gallery featuring the work of artist and plantsman Cedric Morris.
Workshops accompanying the exhibition encouraged Prior Park pupils to explore the connections between art and nature and pay closer attention to the parks around them.
Anna later looked through the children’s sketchbooks and selected observations to become part of the finished artwork.
“The simple phrasing of the children’s recollections seemed to have a spacious, open quality that in itself invited reflection,” she said.
“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 also reflects the artist’s interest in ex-voto objects – offerings traditionally attached to walls and given in gratitude, devotion or testimony – while the plant motifs draw on both her wider artistic practice and vegetation she recorded during walks around Berwick.
The steel panels were made by local specialists Old School Fabrications. Corten steel was chosen because it weathers to a deep rust colour intended to sit naturally alongside the surrounding greenery.
Offerings was commissioned through a collaboration between Friends of Castle Parks, The Maltings (Berwick) Trust and Prior Park Primary. Funding came through Destination Tweed’s Community Grants Scheme, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with additional support secured by The Maltings from the Hadrian Trust.
Jackie Kaines Lang, vice chair of Friends of Castle Parks, 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.”