A musician and an artist connecting to nature in a single day

The Wonderland project is a creative collaboration between a singer-songwriter (Kate Ellis) and a visual artist (Geraldine van Heemstra), using music, art and nature to inspire change.

It aims to give a musical and artistic voice to the environmental rallying cry for urgent government action to protect our planet.

Watch the video and read more about the project below.

“Living all the way through: to touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing the world. If you manage this, then you might walk ‘out of the body and into the mountain’, such that you become, briefly, ‘a stone…the soil of the earth.”

Scottish poet, Nan Shepherd 1940

Kate Ellis

Folk-Americana singer-songwriter Kate Ellis was inspired to write the song ‘Wonderland’ by a walk in a London park when she glimpsed flashes of how alive, powerful, and beautiful nature is and how indivisibly connected to it we are. in Kate’s words: “Wonderland' is about how perceiving nature in a viscerally connected way gives us a deeper appreciation of it and a deeper sense of loss for what we’re putting at risk. Geraldine’s art is the perfect visual expression of the song.”

Hear more of Kate’s music:
www.kateellis.com

Geraldine van Heemstra

A member of the Wilderness Art Collective, artist Geraldine van Heemstra’s work is inspired by intangibility and emotion in the shape, sound, and movement of the natural world. “What attracted me to this collaboration is how Kate’s music communicates the powerful emotional connection we have to nature. We are both responding instinctively to changing colours and patterns of the intangible natural world that is speaking through us in different mediums.”

See more of Geraldine’s art:
www.geraldinevanheemstra.com

A message in a bottle for the UN

The fruits of Kate and Geraldine’s collaboration is the music video above and this sketchbook of original watercolour paintings and charcoal drawings.

The sketchbook (see it in full here) travelled to COP26 and into the hands of delegates via a partnership with Letters To The Earth. Adding language to visual art and music, the sketchbook also contains this letter from Geraldine and Kate to climate leaders in government.