The idea for Forage came from Henna’s own experience of arriving in the North East of England from Finland and the rootedness she first began to feel when she had access to the countryside.



Forage is a participatory commission with refugees and asylum seekers now living in Newcastle and Gateshead. It is a series of walks and conversations in landscapes that are both strange and familiar. It provides the opportunity to discover and recover what it means to belong to a place when displaced from home and to experience the most ‘English’ of our landscapes at National Trust sites across Northumberland and Tyne and Wear. Using foraged plants, stories old and new are interwoven into new experiences for participants, and form the basis of a series public artworks and interventions.