From our home on the wind kissed face of West Dartmoor, we created Tended Hearth to fill a void that we discovered through our own creative practices. We were craving a means to collaborate with other creatives in producing cross-discipline works that don’t necessarily fit into a recognised ‘box’ and still see them reach the wider world in their own unique form.
You’ve wandered long to light
your load, trading burden for
treasured bones, when glints
atop a rocky crop, a doorway
cast by tumbled stone
A deep remembering calls
you home, beacon lit on
hallowed earth, a gathering of
timeless kin, heartsong shared
round Tended Hearth
by Tobias Aisbitt-Waugh
Our inspiration comes from the land around us, the deep medicine carried in our collective stories, and what both can teach us about the shift in human consciousness occurring in these turbulent times. We are also learning the value of collaboration in bringing artists out of their hermit shells, so that they might grow into a wider world so desperately in need of wise and compassionate creations.
By growing projects from spark to beacon, we are putting together a team that can help support creatives on this journey, while empowering them in the truest expression of their work. In this way we hope to begin a global celebration of the myriad artists out there who know that art can shine a light into the darkest corners of the human soul.
Tended Hearth is co-run by husband-and-wife duo, Lily & Tobias Aisbitt Waugh. Living on a 1000-year-old off-grid smallholding on the high moor of Dartmoor National Park, they spend much of their time tending to their agro-forestry Orchard, vegetable garden, and natural dye plant garden. They are passionate about restoring native hedgerows, heritage building techniques, and most recently learning the sacred skills of beekeeping. It is on this smallholding that the couple practice their crafts, bringing to life works of word, wood, and wool under the oak beams of the studio barn. Though their most important work is teaching their two young sons the beauty of this way of life, guiding them as they toddle into the waist high bracken to learn the potent life learnings that the moor has to offer.
TOBIAS AISBITT-WAUGH
Tobias is a poet, writer, and artist. His work sings to the land, grounded in the deep knowing that hums through the myths that bind us. When not working with words, you’ll most likely find him chiselling away in his workshop, searching some piece of wood for a hidden face within.
LILY AISBITT-WAUGH
Lily is a hand weaver, spinner, and natural dyer. Her work is steeped in a deep respect for heritage crafts & the necessary beauty of slow handwork processes. Her work is born of her beloved moorland landscape on which she lives, raises her family, and nurtures her biodynamic inspired vegetable & dye plant garden.
