Idle Women On Land: An ecofeminist manifesto for land-based practices with Rachel Anderson, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Idle Women
10am – 11am, Thursday 1 October 2026
Online
For this session we welcomed Rachel Anderson, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Idle Women, an arts, environment and social justice collaboration based in Hyndburn.
Idle Women create spaces to belong in the margins of public space – on towpaths, in fenced spaces in parks, along footpaths and beaches, and through allotments, gardens and community spaces.
Their work asks us to think differently about land, access, care and the systems that shape our relationships with the places around us.
“It is said that access to green space is ‘healing, therapeutic, nurturing’… we can almost feel it at the end of our fingertips.”
In this session, Rachel shared Idle Women’s ecofeminist manifesto for land-based practices, exploring how their work responds to the interconnected histories and systems of violence that shape land and bodies.
Their thinking and practice considers issues including enclosure, colonisation, extractivism, witch hunts, slavery, displacement, land theft, genocide, deforestation and monocropping – and the ways these histories continue to affect the present.
The session also explored how Idle Women create what they describe as temporary forcefields to hold back the world: spaces for connection, transformation, beauty and possibility.
About Idle Women
Rachel Anderson, alongside Cis O’Boyle and Charmian Griffin, is one of the founding co-directors of Idle Women.
The organisation’s first endeavour was to build and tour NB Selina Cooper with women living in a specialist domestic violence refuge.
Since then, Idle Women have hand-built a Physic Garden in Nelson, Lancashire – a garden created by women, for women. The project is accompanied by the Physic Garden Network, a digital project rooted in the garden.
Idle Women describes its work as a collaboration with women from all walks of life, working to women’s strengths and recognising that transformation is a daily process.
Their approach is a powerful reminder that land-based creative practice can be about much more than environmental sustainability. It can also create spaces for connection, agency, care and social change.
This session was not recorded.