Transdisciplinary artist Sarah Strachan offers a practice-based researcher’s perspective on Thinking with the Harrisons. The book explores how this renowned eco-artist duo’s responsive, ‘conversational drift’ approach suggests how artistic inquiry can remain open to ecological complexity and uncertainty.
1,820 words: estimated reading time = approximately 7.5 minutes
Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis Art offers an exploration into the pioneering and prophetic work of eco-artist duo Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) in conversation with the writings of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead’s concepts of process philosophy. The authors, Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, position the Harrisons not as historical figures to be interpreted from a distance but as collaborators whose approaches continue to shape contemporary ecological art. This shift — from thinking about to thinking with — is central to the book’s structure and argument. It reframes the Harrisons’ practice as an ongoing, relational inquiry rather than a closed body of work, and it invites readers to inhabit the methodological openness that characterised their ecological engagements.
“Rethinking the arts in the environmental crisis involves questioning the conventions of art and their appropriateness for a rapidly changing world just as Whitehead’s search for a different philosophy of nature involved him questioning the foundations of science and Stengers, the questioning of the cultural values of technoscience.”
— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p. 105)
The book is described by educator, artist and researcher, Iain Biggs as “an unusual and highly important text” that focuses on “how the Harrisons’ unfolding process addresses a series of fundamental and pressing ecological questions”.1 However, for me, its most significant contribution lies in its articulation of thinking with and conversational drift as methodological frameworks. For practice-based researchers like me, these concepts are not merely descriptive of the Harrisons’ approach; they constitute an epistemic orientation and methodological process for engaging with ecological complexity, multispecies entanglement, and climate-related transformation.
Thinking with: a relational epistemology
The concept of thinking with emerges throughout the book as an epistemic orientation grounded in relationality, responsiveness, and co-production. To think with the Harrisons is to enter the same mode of inquiry that animated their practice: a willingness to be transformed by the ecological, social, cultural, and political contexts one encounters.
For practice-based researchers, thinking with is significant because it challenges the assumption that research begins with a stable problem or a fixed set of methods. Instead, it suggests that ecological research must be co-constituted with the systems it engages. Thinking with becomes a form of methodological humility — an acknowledgement that ecological knowledge is distributed across species, landscapes, and processes, and that the researcher’s role is to participate in these distributed networks of sense making. Douglas and Fremantle emphasise that thinking with is not a metaphorical gesture but a practical orientation. It shapes how the Harrisons approached sites, collaborators, and ecological crises. It also shapes how the book itself is organised: as a polyphonic assemblage of voices, perspectives, and disciplinary positions that collectively enact the relational ethos of the Harrisons’ work.
Conversational drift: methodology as movement
If thinking with provides the epistemic orientation, conversational drift provides the methodological process. Conversational drift describes the Harrisons’ characteristic way of working: beginning with a question, entering dialogue with collaborators (human and more-than-human), and allowing the conversation to move in unexpected directions. Crucially, drift is not a lack of focus; it is a method of ecological attunement. It can mean both “the motion and the result of that motion”.2 It mirrors the dynamics of ecological systems, which are non-linear, iterative, adaptive, and relational. Drift allows the work to follow ecological cues rather than impose a predetermined structure. It is a methodology that privileges openness and emergence. For practice-based researchers, conversational drift offers a model for how artistic inquiry can remain open to ecological complexity without becoming overwhelmed. It becomes a way of navigating uncertainty — of allowing the research to unfold in relation to the shifting conditions of the ecological systems it engages.
The book highlights that the Harrisons’ conversations were never limited to human interlocutors. Their work is filled with dialogues with watersheds, species, coastlines, and climatic forces. These conversations are not symbolic; they are methodological. They reflect the Harrisons’ commitment to treating ecological entities as collaborators with agency.
“Conversation in this work is not limited to people but to the interaction between elements in the landscape shaped by human self-interest in the form of farming, paper mills, channels, levees and inevitably toxic pollution. The idea of joining the ‘odd kind of dialogue’ in which ‘the business of the universe/is conducted’ (Seventh Lagoon/91) here becomes the discourse of that place.”
— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p.102)
Conversational drift, in this context, becomes a way of listening to ecological processes. It requires the researcher to attend to signals that may not be verbal or human-centred: the movement of water, the behaviour of species, the shifting of coastlines. It becomes a method for recognising that ecological knowledge is co-produced across species and systems. This more-than-human conversational method anticipates contemporary multispecies and post-humanist scholarship, yet the Harrisons’ approach remains grounded in material processes. Their conversations with landscapes are informed by ecological data, fieldwork, and site-specific observation. Here, conversational drift is both conceptual and operational.
Mapping, scale, and systems thinking
Both thinking with and conversational drift are deeply entangled with the Harrisons’ commitment to systems thinking. The authors emphasise the Harrisons’ ability to drift across different scales — from lagoon to watershed to planet. This movement is not arbitrary; it reflects the ecological reality that local phenomena are embedded within larger systemic dynamics. For practice-based researchers, this raises important methodological questions. How can artistic practice operate at scales that exceed the human sensorium? How can research remain grounded in local specificity while attending to planetary processes?
The book suggests that thinking with and conversational drift offer a way through this tension. They allow the work to move fluidly between scales, guided by the ecological relations that emerge through conversation. Scale becomes a drifting relation rather than a fixed parameter.
The Harrisons’ conversational texts — hybrid forms of poetry, dialogue, and ecological proposition — are central to their practice, and the book treats them as methodological artefacts. These texts embody conversational drift in their structure: they move between voices, temporalities, and epistemic registers, refusing closure in favour of ongoing inquiry. For practice-based researchers, these texts demonstrate how writing can function as a site of ecological experimentation. The drift of language becomes a method for exploring ecological futures that are not yet materially realised. Thinking with becomes a textual practice as much as an ecological one.
Critical reflections: the limits of drift and relationality
The book presents thinking with and conversational drift not as perfected research methodologies but as ongoing, situated practices that must continually negotiate their own limitations. Drift can be difficult to reconcile with institutional structures that demand clarity, deliverables, and measurable outcomes. Thinking with requires time, trust, and relational labour that institutions often undervalue. Whilst these attributes of the method offer potential for art practice-based research, as artists and researchers we need to work within the constraints of these institutional structures.
There is also a risk that drift, if unexamined, can obscure issues of power and representation. Who participates in the conversation? Who is authorised to drift? As Grant Kester acknowledges, “voices that run contrary to official wisdom often take longer to locate and are more difficult to hear”.3 Whilst the authors foreground these tensions by recognising that “systems continue to reveal and confirm biases and structural inequalities”4 and “the arts and the environment and conservation movements are still characterised by a lack of cultural diversity”,5 there is a reliance on artists from within the Eurocentric hegemony in the chapter titled thinking with one another. This references artists immanent in the Harrisons’ work, who have furthered it through experimentation or of the same generation with similar concerns but using different approaches; although, as outlined in an earlier article on the Harrisons, their enquiry has focused primarily on artistic practices that openly acknowledge the Harrisons’ influence.6
A methodological invitation
The authors position thinking with and conversational drift as evolving and generative methodologies for ecological art in the era of climate crisis. They offer a way of engaging with ecological complexity that is adaptive, relational, and open to transformation. They challenge artists and practice-based researchers to cultivate methods that are responsive to ecological systems that embrace uncertainty and that recognise conversation — human and more-than-human — as a form of ecological agency.
“Could the Harrison’s key contribution lie in how they share their learning in such a way that those who follow grasp their experience with clarity? Unlike the world of art and its proprietorial character, the Harrisons are not afraid of other people making use of their work”
— Thinking with the Harrisons (2024, p. 214)
In this sense, the book is not simply a retrospective on the Harrisons’ work but a methodological invitation. It claims that the Harrisons’ legacy is not a set of works but a way of working that remains urgently relevant. It asks us to continue thinking with the Harrisons by allowing our own practices to drift — toward new collaborators, new scales, and new ecological futures.
Sarah’s references
[1] Biggs, I., 2024. Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environmental Crisis: A review
[2] Strachan, S., 2023. A drift in conversation: Across hierarchies and beyond boundaries. Journal of Arts Writing by Students. (Bristol, UK; Intellect Publishing. p. 92.)
[3] Kester, G., 2004. Conversation pieces: Community and communication in modern art (University of California Press, Berkeley. p.172.)
[4] Brain, T., 2018. The environment is not a system. A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 7(1), pp.152-165.
[5] Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C., 2024. Thinking with the Harrisons. Reimagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
[6] Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C., 2023. Thinking with the Harrisons: what does now demand? Field: a journal of socially-engaged art criticism, 23.
Find more
Thinking with the Harrisons: Reimagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis, by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, is published by Leuven University Press (2024).
Anne Douglas (Professor Emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland) has written about the book at the Leuven University Press blog (September 2024).
You can explore the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at The Harrison Studio.
Craig Adcock was the first to use the term ‘Conversational drift’ as the process undertaken by the Harrisons. It was the title of an article which documented a conversation between the three of them. He writes: “The title ‘conversational drift’, which they suggested, is meant to reflect both the process of interchange that occurred between us and also to suggest how their ecologically orientated art function in general: their work sets up situations both in art galleries and in the halls of government that encourage the conversation to open up, to change, and to drift toward innovative and creative solutions to real world problems.” (Conversational Drift: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Adcock, Craig: Art Journal, Volume 51, Issue 2 (1992) p. 45)
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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Sarah – “In my practice, I enter into deep conversations with people, place, the land and its materials. More recently this has also specifically involved conversations with generative AI, which is helping me to explore the concept of more-than-human conversation further. Therefore, the development of this review has been informed by conversations with all these entities.”
Artist 
