The Wild Escape
The Wild Escape, a UK-wide project, inspired young people to find creatures in art and natural history collections and imagine the creature escaping from the museum to a new Wild World.
In the largest ever collaboration between museums, galleries, historic places and sites across the UK, thousands of young people created art inspired by nature in paintings, sculptures, display cases and the outdoors. Young people imagined their creatures escaping to a magical, collective online artwork, the Wild World, launched on Earth Day, 22 April 2023.
A HUGE thank you to the 532 museums, over 800 schools and thousands of children who came together to make The Wild Escape such a success.
Leading artists participated in the project including Es Devlin, Heather Phillipson, Rana Begum, Mollie Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Tai Shani, FKA Twigs, Claire Twomey, Mark Wallinger and Jeremy Deller, with their works displayed alongside those by 7-11 year olds.
The project was inspired by BBC Wild Isles, and in partnership with WWF, RSPB, National Trust, English Heritage and the Save Our Wild Isles campaign.
The Wild Escape was created in response to UK-wide research showing that welcoming children and schools is a top priority for museums across the UK. We will be publishing our report on the project at the end of November 2023 – if you’re a museum and have any questions about the project, please contact our Museum Marketing team by emailing museums@artfund.org.
Resources and toolkits for teachers and museums can be found here.
The Wild World
The Wild World is a huge, collective artwork filled with thousands of creatures drawn and made by children across the UK. During the project, participants were able to send their creature to this digital landscape, imagining a better future for biodiversity.
Leading artists also joined in, creating artworks inspired by their favourite museum including Heather Phillipson, Chris Riddell, Yinka Shonibare, Claire Twomey, Bob and Roberta Smith and many more.
The Wild World was made by BAFTA-winning games studio Preloaded, and is a Lovie Award nominee 2023, recognising European Internet excellence in the fields of culture and technology.
Nature in collections
The Wild Escape inspired young people to imagine creatures they found in paintings, mosaics and natural history collections escaping from museums, galleries and historic houses across the UK. Looking for nature is a wonderful way to follow curious minds and adventurous young people around any collection, and to think about how we can protect nature with creative action.
Discover more natural connections using The Wild Escape Guide on Bloomberg Connects showing original artworks that have inspired artists and young people across the UK.
Visit Drawing and painting textures and What is a comic? on BBC Bitesize to find resources made in partnership with Art Fund.
