One evening inside.
Picture a garden after dusk. No queue pushing you forward, no announcements, no sudden anything. Light we’ve composed moves gently through historic trees — some of it literally paced to the rhythm of calm breathing. You step onto a path and a low, warm tone answers your footstep, in tune with everything around it. Your child holds a hand near a sensor and colour ripples through the dark. Somebody you’ve never met steps on the next stone, and their note joins yours — in the same key, so it can’t clash.
Nobody is performing. Nobody can get it wrong. You stay as long as you like at each piece, or sit and let the garden settle around you. What the people there do shapes what happens — it may feel similar the next time you come, but it will never be the same.
That’s what we’re building. It doesn’t exist yet — this is our first year, and this page describes work being designed and prototyped now. We’d rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise.
A calm evening out, in the seasons that need one.
The big seasonal events — the fright nights, the firework displays, the Christmas trails — can be overwhelming by design: loud, fast, crowded, herded. For a lot of families, especially those with autistic and disabled children, and for many adults, that rules out the shared evening traditions everyone else takes for granted. The choice becomes: endure it, leave early, or stay home.
We’re building the third option properly: a beautiful, immersive, co-creative evening in nature, designed from the ground up for the nervous systems the loud events overwhelm — and timed for the seasons when the mainstream calendar is at its loudest. Not instead of those events — alongside them, for the people they don’t fit. That includes families who sit out the mainstream seasonal celebrations altogether, for any reason: a calm evening among trees and light asks nothing of anyone.
How it’s built.
Each installation is made of self-contained modules — interactive stepping stones, presence-detection layers, tactile stations, breathing-paced light, daylight-refraction optics. Each runs on its own. They’re tied together not by a central computer but by a single shared musical key, so everything you trigger stays in tune with everything else.
Every installation includes at least one module designed for whoever has the least movement available — playable by presence, a glance or proximity alone — so they shape the work rather than watch it.
The evening is the full composition: light we make and choreograph, sound responsive and immediate. The same module library serves our daytime sensory gardens in schools and care settings — evening is where the whole orchestra plays.
We build on open, hackable tools — Raspberry Pi, Pure Data, MIDI — so the work stays durable, repairable, and free of corporate lock-in. We’re also developing responsive AI to extend how an installation adapts, in real time, to the people moving through it.
Arley AfterDark — the first full design.
Arley AfterDark is our first full installation design — a design concept created for Arley Arboretum, one of Britain’s oldest arboretums, here in Worcestershire. An evening walk through historic trees, where light moves at the pace of breath and every visitor’s presence plays a part in the sound of the whole garden. It’s the evening face of the work; the same module library serves our daytime sensory gardens in schools and care settings.
It’s the Year 2 goal on our roadmap. Year 1 comes first: building and testing the individual modules it will be assembled from, in the open, with the people they’re designed for. The concept exists so you can picture where the work is going — and so venues and funders can see the shape of what they’d be part of.
The installation sits inside the place. The place remains itself — every module is fully removable, and the garden returns to exactly what it was.
For venues — where the work can live.
We design for places that already hold a calm or contemplative atmosphere: heritage and private gardens, arboretums and parks — and, indoors, churches, cathedrals and historic buildings. We reveal and complement a setting rather than override it. And because the work is modular, it fits the space and the budget it finds:
- Pop-up We set up for a few days or a season, deliver the experience, and remove it without a trace.
- Rotating The core stays; modules refresh on a rolling basis, so there’s always a reason to come back — and the favourites remain.
- Permanent A dedicated sensory garden, built into a school’s or venue’s own grounds.
For venues: you have beautiful space; we bring programming that welcomes visitors you don’t normally reach — families with autistic and disabled children, and the many people who find busy events too much. A genuine accessibility offer and a new audience, with the delivery handled by us. If you steward a site that might host this work, we’d love to talk.
For schools, respite and care settings: the daytime side of the work is yours — see Sensory Gardens.
Start the conversation.
Venue, commissioner or funder — the first step is the same. (Schools and care settings: start at Sensory Gardens.) Email info@interwovenartscic.org and tell us where you are and what you’re imagining. We’ll share how we work, and the founder pack if you want the full plan.