It is here that I pause to reflect on my own lived experience in relation to the ideas of eco-art therapy, nature-connected therapy and ecopsychology and my research as an arts therapy student. We recognise ancient artforms, such as prehistoric cave painting and rock art, as evidence that people used art to articulate what was important to their lives, utilising available materials to express their connection and experience. Despite this, the idea of eco-art therapy is seen as a new, innovative aspect of exploring our lived experience. The roots of eco-art therapy reach back to the earliest human art-making, through which people were intimately connected to their environments. It is entwined with the historical use of art as ritual, narrative, interaction, and spiritual connection (Gablik, 1991). Eco-art therapy opens us to an expansion of our awareness and creative responses beyond centring on the individual, group, or specific culture to include larger ecological systems as the source of both suffering and restorative healing (Speert, 2016). I consider the notion of eco-art therapy and ecopsychology as a rekindling of the connections of our cultural practices and knowledge through a weaving of visual stories that includes all aspects of the animate world. As Roszak writes, “Other therapies seek to heal the alienation between person and person, person and family, person, and society. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the person and the natural environment” (Roszak et al., 1995, p.48). Louv (2005) conceived of the phrase “nature deficit disorder” as he studied children isolated from experiences of interaction with nature, in a world where increased dependence on the consumption of digital technology has become the way in which we communicate and experience the world. By creating art in relation to the whole animate planet, we reconsider the context of emotional and psychological health within an ecology beyond the individual, community or even the human species.

Reflexive objectives

Arts-based research is a disruption to traditional research as it expands methodology rather than adopting the arts to form an adjunctive relationship. The form of my naturalistic and interpretive inquiry seeks to question the conventional paradigms of communication and understanding by looking at the alternative language of art-making, within the context of relationship with the ecology of the Earth. It is not that I am uninterested in the idea that language can coexist, support and potentially companion my artwork as a means to explain or give an audience access to art. My primary focus is, however, that art-making itself is a reflexive, embodied process of meaning making, that can be language enough. I have chosen to focus on a phenomenological understanding rather than an explanation as an objective, thereby fostering subjective meaning-making of lived experience through interaction and connectedness to ‘being-in-the-world’ (Spinelli, 1997).

Through the forming of this inquiry, other questions have arisen for me: What is our aesthetic response to the ecology of the Earth? How can we truly live a reciprocal existence with the landscape that we inhabit? Kimmerer (2013) speaks of a mutual exchange in our relationship with Mother Earth: that we are inextricably connected to Her through the potentiality of reciprocal relationship. I will hold these questions in my inquiry while considering Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) ideas of phenomenological perception as a reciprocal exchange between the living body and the animate world that surrounds it.

For me, as a multidisciplinary artist and art therapist, making artwork is a responsive experience to being in the world; it is part of who I am. What is revealed within this reflexive process can be emergent and unexpected, and profoundly significant to my lived experience. My creative process often begins with a single moment or an experience with nature that resonates with me – where I feel an emotive response, a bodily sensation that moves me, a moment of awe and phenomenological connection to the natural world as ‘Other’, as companion. The artwork becomes a woven thread of this lived experience and may include imagery and motifs suggestive of the phenomenon that sparked the bodily response. Within this articulation of art-making comes a deepening of connection to my world view and to my relational sense of place with the Earth body. This is an emergent, reflexive process and can take many iterations to come to a resolution or congruency.

I am reminded of the theory of Roszak (1995) relating to the dichotomy of ‘in-here’ and ‘out-there’: the conceptual distance that has been created between ourselves and non-human nature and how my creative process is a movement towards a dynamic centering of my interrelatedness with the natural world, acknowledging that we are ‘of’ the world, not separate from it. Deep ecology (Devall & Sessions, 2001) and spiritual ecology (Vaughan-Lee, 2016) seek to redefine the Western cultural paradigm of the separateness and objectification of non-human life forms, to reconnect us with the animacy of the Earth, to understand and respect the sentience of all beings, and to honour ancient, wise ways of knowing as opportunities for reciprocity and kinship.  Through art-making and the creative connections of sensory language, we can communicate with the natural world around us, recognising that the wordless intelligence is also united with our own inner landscape.

Ways of being

My methodology is defined by an interpretivist epistemology, where I am part of the research and the interpreter of the multimodal data. This is a living inquiry where I consider my ecocentric, nature-centered world view – that humans are not a superior species, and that plants and animals are all sentient, evolutionary partners – in relation to my belief that art-making connects us to our true self and to the Earth body and is language enough in expressing embodied experience. In this art-based inquiry, the art-making exists both as companion to my inquiry and part of my research methodology. This is my present place of knowing, my reference point for emergent process. The artistic process is a visual and expressive harnessing of nascent, emotional responses and a way to come to new knowing, and in this sense is research data.  

I am aware of a dissonance when forming this written interpretation of a living inquiry: both the paradox of using dominant language to describe what is unspoken and the objectification of intellectualisation through the written word, which can keep us at a disconnect with the natural world, and potentially undermine the potency of experience. To remain present and reflexive in my inquiry, I bracket in this discord into the process as a focused reminder to not be too weighed down by expected ways of being, and instead be open to the phenomenological wisdom that emerges.

My creative process is characteristically cyclical: for many years, I have had a daily practice of walking amongst the trees on Djaara Country, observing, listening, and experiencing place as a sensory and collaborative interaction, returning to my studio resonant with this intersubjective experience. The evolution of the art-making is an emergent response; the incipient art-making is a creative inner unfolding and I return to nature seeing more because of what has come forth in the making. I walk, observe, and experience, and so the reflexive cycle of new iterations continues. The holding of bodily awareness is both a felt sense (Gendlin, 1997) and a collection of mental aesthetic snapshots that become visual and sensory stimuli for my art-making process: the verdant beauty of a mossy boulder; the cool, fresh air tingling in my nostrils; the sound of white-winged choughs echoing, as they fly overhead; the graphic, meandering scarifications, caused by termite feasting, on a giant fallen eucalypt. This is an emergent knowing born from the intersubjective space between me, the Earth body, and the artefacts; meanings are arrived at through companioning and somatic and sensory dialoguing, without words. Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, a Daly River woman of the Ngangikurungkurr tribe, writes of the reflective practice of ‘Dadirri’ (Ungunmerr-Baumann et al., 2022); an inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. I honour ‘Dadirri’ as a way of being present in this space of co-inquiry; the materials are supportive and bear witness to my phenomenological experience with the Earth as a living being. There is no need for spoken language.