Imagining Life Underground Workshop Action shots
This session was created to support the work of DARCH - Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel so please be aware that some of the visuals included are lovingly inspired by or reproduced directly from their 2025 Liverpool Biennial work ‘Heaven In The Ground’!
‘‘Over two days young families were busy making their own underground creatures with hand-coloured air drying clay. Together, we thought about creatures and where they live, what they eat, and each wrote a letter of a favourite memory to feed back to the soil for the creatures to keep safe. Together we dug around in a pile of soil, discovering what lay underneath - shiny clay worms, colourful beetle heads and wings. As we dug around we also heard the reverberant and strange echoes the soil made, thanks to contact mics and sound made with Sara Wolff
This workshop was inspired by a sound piece made by DARC collective, created for the Liverpool Biennial 2025. DARCH is a collective of practice by Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel. ‘‘
- At The Libraries on ‘Imagining Life Underground’
Activity Sheet
As part of the workshop’s development, a bespoke worksheet was created by Ignora for the young participants to engage with, featuring questions as prompts, games and spaces for their own creativity and reflections on the ideas explored within the session.
‘‘Taking place at Crosby Library, ‘Imagining life underground’ was a workshop produced by myself as a family session responding to DARCH’s Liverpool Biennial work, ‘Heaven In The Ground’. Invited by ‘At The Library’ to develop an experience that would help young people to connect with the contents of the sound work on display in both the space, and the installation at FACT Liverpool, I led children to create their own underground creatures out of colourful clay.
The central feature of the room was a giant interactive soil pile - a perfect hiding place for an abundance of mini-beast parts handmade by me, designed to act as inspiration or building blocks as I encouraged them to imagine what features their own fantastical creatures may have. The soil provided a tactile gathering point, and generated a custom live-audio in response to their digging, which was realized through collaboration with sound artist Sara Woolfe. The play-led sessions gave families permission to develop outcomes on their own terms - reading through books on real life beings that live in the earth, watching my animated projections, or having conversations around key messages developed by DARCH, such as ‘No matter what land you find yourself on, you can always call it home’.’’
- Ignora on ‘Imagining Life Underground’
Click below to find Out more about DARCH’s practice, and their work in the 2025 Liverpool Biennial!