About
Welcome to The Wild Escape, a major new project uniting hundreds of museums and schools in a celebration of UK wildlife and creativity.
Take part in The Wild Escape
Register hereThe Wild Escape is the largest ever collaboration between the UK’s museums. Supported by Arts Council England, the project aims to inspire hundreds of thousands of children to visit museums and respond creatively to the threat to the UK’s natural environment by looking for animals featured in museum collections and creating their own wildlife artworks.
On Earth Day Saturday 22 April, an epic-scale digital artwork will be unveiled featuring the animals imagined by children all over the country, inspired by the collections of hundreds of UK museums.
Leading artists are supporting the project by creating their own artworks based on animals in museum collections to inspire children to take part. They include FKA Twigs, Es Devlin, Heather Phillipson, Rana Begum, Mollie Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Tai Shani, Claire Twomey, Mark Wallinger, Angela Palmer, Bob and Roberta Smith amongst many others.
The Wild Escape is made possible by lead support from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants, with additional support from Art Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Kusuma Trust, Foyle Foundation and a group of generous individuals and trusts.
Get inspired and discover how you can get involved with The Wild Escape using The Wild Escape Guide wherever you are, on Bloomberg Connects.
How to take part
Join in by adding your artwork to an epic, collective work of art called The Wild World.
If you’re a family
Your journey starts in your local habitat. Check out a museum or gallery near you or just peek out at the wildlife all around.
Find inspiration in the shape of an animal that lives in the UK, draw it and help it escape into an epic, collective work of art we call The Wild World.
If you’re a teacher
Schools can take part in The Wild Escape by finding a workshop or activity hosted by a museum to attend, or by planning a self-guided visit or in-classroom activity. Search this map to plan a school visit to a Wild Escape workshop/activity at a museum near you or explore our free resources to help you participate from the classroom.
Once your classroom has created their creatures, you can submit them by email (or WeTransfer if your files are large) to creatures@thewildescape.org.uk along with this completed PDF form. A Word version is also available. Please note we cannot accept images that include photographs of people or include text. You can read our full Terms & Conditions here.
Once you’ve sent us the image, we will reply to the contact details given with a unique code/s so that you can find the artworks in The Wild World.
If you’re a museum
Museums, galleries and historic houses can continue to take part by pointing families to things in your collection that include UK wildlife – it could be in a painting, drawing, sculpture, as well as natural history collection or architecture.
If you don’t have collections with representations of UK wildlife, you can find inspiration from the local environment or use history to make links to wildlife and the landscape.
You can download our handy guide for your front of house teams so they can confidently answer any questions your visitors have.
We have also created an A3 poster and digital assets for you to display prominently onsite and online, so visitors can easily take part and gain all the information and inspiration they need to submit their drawings of animals to the Wild World.
Plus, you can download Find Our Forgotten Creatures – our unique Wild Escape activity and audio adventure to encourage young visitors to find your undiscovered creatures. This includes a briefing, poster and activity sheet that links to an exciting audio guide narrated by one of Britain's best loved presenters, Konnie Huq, whose voice accompanies the young person on their search.
Please also join the conversation on social media using #TheWildEscape
You can plan new or additional activities until the end of July 2023. All resources are free to use and have been drawn from existing materials created by museums, arts organisations and learning professionals. We’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to these resources and allowed them to be shared.
Help
Don’t worry, we can help! Email creatures@thewildescape.org and lets us know what you are having trouble with. If possible, please included details of the type of device and web browser you are using e.g. Windows PC, Chrome. This information helps us solve any technical problems much more quickly.
We check everything you send to us before it goes online to make sure that it is suitable for everyone. We make sure that your work is not rude, harmful or scary for other users.
We are looking for images of artwork that:
- have been created by young people in your Wild Escape workshops with schools or public facing programmes and activities
- are drawn, painted, sculpted, or created in whatever creative medium you’ve chosen!
- feature a creature that lives in the UK landscape
We cannot accept images that:
- include photographs of people
- include text
Please email (or WeTransfer if your files are large) creatures@thewildescape.org.uk your image(s) along with this completed PDF form. A Word version is also available. You can read our full Terms & Conditions here.
Once you’ve sent us the image, we will reply to the contact details given with a unique code/s so that you can find the artworks in The Wild World.
The artwork will be live until the end of July, so you can follow creatures through their new digital home.
Our research told us that teachers wanted to connect to museums, and that museum directors count young people and schools as one of their key priorities. We also know that the sector is looking for ways to unite around sustainability, and we know that we have a key role to convene organisations in our sector. So we’ve created this project to do all of those things, and we’re so glad to have made all sorts of partnerships already to amplify the amazing work that takes place in museums year in year out.
Yes. We know that some collections and buildings may not have representations of creatures, but hope that you can either partner with another organisation, or invite a creative practitioner to respond to the links between your collection and nature, or even use your outdoor space. We are inviting artists to spark inspiration about the local environment or use history to make links to wildlife and the landscape. Get in touch if it’s helpful to talk this through.
Don't worry, activity at your museum can be as large or as small as you like and are able to commit. You can bring The Wild Escape into any existing programming you have around any of the project’s themes. We will also be launching more resources early in 2023, with self-guided family activities you can host in the Easter holidays and in the lead up to Earth Day.
Applications for small project grants across the nations have now closed.
No – we encourage you to explore The Wild Escape in the most relevant way for your museum and do what works for you. You can tie in activity to priorities at your museum (e.g. to explore different areas of the museum or to reach younger audiences). We have made some creative activities with partner museums which you can find on the resources page – these are downloadable and ready to go, but you don’t have to use them.
This evolution of the project's name now directly captures our aim to encourage the next generation to picture the future of UK wildlife through your collections.
Support is available in the form of a downloadable school visit toolkit which can be used to help reach out to teachers, suggest what information teachers will need, what general policies are required and a helpful checklist for planning a school visit. A template letter to local schools and template booking form can also be downloaded and edited. We’re hoping that this project can kickstart some new relationships and activities that can be repeated year on year.
Yes, The Wild Escape invites you to connect with a local primary school to run workshops, but we understand that this won’t be possible for everyone. If you would like to extend your schools offer to other local groups such as guides or scouts, you can. Just let us know via the ‘Take part’ section on our website.
Our creative activities will be available in Welsh as well as our ‘‘working with schools’ resources. For welsh versions, please contact thewildescape@artfund.org.
