Exploring how people reconnect with place, meaning and belonging in everyday life.
Rebecca Burns
Researcher | Writer | Creative Practitioner
Working across place, culture and meaning-making.
Based in Herefordshire.
Through creative, place-based practice, I design ways for people to notice, interpret and stay in relationship with the places they live.
About My Work
My work explores how people experience the places they live, and how those relationships shape identity, memory and belonging.
Why this Matters
Many people feel disconnected from where they live, from each other, and from a sense of meaning in everyday life.
My work explores how creative, place-based practices can help rebuild those connections, offering new ways to relate to the world through attention, interpretation and shared experience.
Current Work
A body of work exploring how relationships to place are formed, experienced and sustained.
Oracle of Place
A practice-based research project exploring how people relate to the places they live.
Through creative prompts and participatory methods, the project invites people to notice, interpret and engage with local landscapes in new ways. Rather than documenting place, it focuses on how meaning is created through everyday encounters, memory and attention.
The work explores how these small, repeatable interactions can support a deeper sense of connection, belonging and cultural identity over time.
Place-Based Projects
Collaborative work with communities in Herefordshire, exploring how local stories, memory and lived experience shape relationships to place.
These projects use simple, creative methods to open up conversation and reflection, creating space for people to share how they experience their surroundings and what those places mean to them.
The focus is on participation, interpretation and the ways cultural knowledge circulates through everyday life, rather than formal archives or institutions.
Research
PhD research at the University of Worcester, examining how place-based practices support connection, belonging and wellbeing.
The research brings together creative practice, cultural theory and lived experience to explore how people form relationships with place, and how those relationships can be sustained through meaningful, repeatable engagement.
It sits at the intersection of therapeutic landscapes, folklore and ritual, reframed through contemporary, participatory approaches to cultural practice.
Together, this work explores how culture is not only created, but lived, shared and sustained through everyday relationships with place.
