Community and School Workshops
Outreach
Artist Sam Gare designed and delivered workshops that created life-sized cardboard whale puppets with schools and communities. Schools could choose from three bespoke workshops:
Marine Mystery, where pupils became ‘marine detectives’ investigating the causes of strandings
Whale Ecology & Art, where children learned about pilot whale behaviour before decorating their own 2.5m whale puppets with the imagined life of the whales
Performance & Puppetry, where the puppets became characters in short plays with music and movement
We approached eight schools across Lewis, Harris, and Uist, with four taking part, involving 121 pupils from six classes (primary 4–5). Alongside this, three open community workshops during the Outer Hebrides Wildlife Festival invited people of all ages to co-create a 2.5m ‘community island whale’ for Uist, Harris, and Lewis.
At ‘Keening - Song of the Stranding’ all eight life-sized puppets were brought together, reuniting this island-wide pod in a collective act of creativity, imagination and remembrance.
