…exercising human AND more-than-human sensing…

Leaf Hearing Blue, Moss Tickling a Soil (2021) is an art-research project exploring how exercising our sensuous being might foster closer and more care-full relationships with ecology. How might recognising the abilities of other sensing beings inspire us to exercise our own sense-able being?; re/discover ways to meet the more-than-human?; imagine how multi-species make co-flourishing worlds?

I attempted to materialise or give visual form to my experiences of trying to re-situate myself in ecology. The resultant collaged and layered ‘assemblage visuals’ are a feel for the fractured, distorted and incompleteness of an experience. It is impossible to experience what Others experience and perceive - we are building our own realities as we sense and are sensed and we in-fill the gaps with our imagination. How remarkable? In the process I attempt to reclaim “aestheticization” from a privileging of the visual to something more holistically experiential referring to the Greek etymology of the word “aisthanomai” - “I perceive, feel, sense, notice.” Further still - it’s all a mesh, a mess, a tantalising tangle of received impressions and experiences, unique to you. The images I produced are in radical opposition to the individual and siloed ‘I’- we are part of inter-smushed, knotty assemblages. They trouble the idea that humans are separate from ‘nature’ - we can’t perceive the whole of nature because we are ‘a’ part of it. Think about how receipt of information through your sensorium is to situate yourself in a collage of information and interaction. We can arrange ourselves differently in that composition - we can change position, attend in different light-times, dial into intimate vignettes then expand out into a fresco of indistinguishable colours.

These prints adorned the writing cabin inside Phytology, a pocket woodland in London’s Bethnal Green as well as the inside of an exhibition space within St John Bethnal Green.