A group of Oxfordshire-based artists worked together to create a special camera at Oxford City Farm, woven from willow that grows on the site to celebrate the community who work and enjoy the land there. The camera is part of Terra Obscura, a creative research project developed by artist Fred Branson with thanks to funding from Arts Council England. Over the past year Fred has been building a collection of portraits that explore stories of land work among small-scale, and community farmers in the UK. For each portrait, Fred works with his subject(s) to design and build a large format pinhole camera, using materials specific to the land they farm – soil, crop residues, grasses, wool, straw bales. This collaborative process, along with the resulting images, orientate a subsequent conversation, which explores participants’ relationships with land.   For the pinhole camera at Oxford City Farm, a small copse of willow – one that had been planted on the site as part of a volunteer’s Bar Mitzvah ceremony – offered the chance to work with a material as versatile as it was rich in meaning. We created a beautiful structure using the Native Osier, Jaune Hautive, Noire de Villaine, and Flanders Red that grow on the farm. This was then clad on the inside with a cob mixture made up of clay sub-soil from the farm, sand, water and bulrush heads. The pinhole ‘lenses’ were made from aluminium cans, mounted on willow bark.    See more about the project here: www.fredbranson.squarespace.com @fredbransonmaker