Ecological artist and researcher Laura Donkers reflects on community drawing approaches to uncovering shared emotional connections and promoting dialogue about ‘home’ as ‘place’ and ‘process’ — both aspects impacted by human-caused climate change, ecological breakdown, and biodiversity loss.
1,450 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes
We consider this vibrant, beautiful, and resilient living world as our home: yet the impacts of human-caused climate change and ecological breakdown challenge this concept. While we witness these impacts on the daily news or experience it for ourselves there is an urgency to explore the emotional experiences involved in facing the climate crisis and a need for exchange and dialogue to generate new connections and understanding across peoples and cultures. Climate change forces us to reflect on how we are living and the intrinsic link to wider social issues of housing, environmental degradation, access to public services and poverty that is causing a re-envisioning of the concept of home as both as a process and a territory.
In these challenging times, art can help to focus perspectives on uncertainty about living in places that are changing, offering forms of connection that complement, challenge, and expand understanding. Socially engaged approaches especially offer unique opportunities to share that can help people process complex emotional experiences, and establish ways to imagine and act together.
For example, participatory drawing offers the participant a visual form of ‘being heard’ that can create insights into place between the people who live there, and also present different world views as a visual conversation. It provides a way to unpack assumptions about the emotional demands of the climate crisis by focusing on situated, localised and personal experiences towards developing shared emotional connection.
Place and process — community drawing for home
In November 2023, the Hokianga Community Drawing Project deployed the creative agency of collective drawing to achieve a non-textual rendition of how the climate crisis is affecting communities located to the north and south of the Hokianga ferry link in Northland, Aotearoa New Zealand. This drawing project was delivered in the historic town of Rawene during a four-week artist residency, with the aim of uncovering lived experience connections between people, place and location at a time of climate crisis.
I delivered the project as a series of street-based workshops held at public events, community galleries, used-book sales and produce markets. The workshops made use of very simple materials which were safe to handle and durable enough to withstand the rigours of the workshop environment. These were a primed canvas roll (10m x 1.5m) and home-made charcoal from the local mangrove trees. This local material proved to be a most valuable instrument for initiating discussion on climate change. Mangrove trees typify Northland’s inter-tidal zones. They provide important habitat for unique biodiversity. They have an unequalled ability to buffer coastal erosion and storm surges and have great capacity for carbon capture and storage. However, their cultural significance in Māori allegory regarding their mana (prestige and power) as ancestors encapsulating the hau (essence) of the location proved to be an important contribution to the successful delivery of the project.
On arriving in Rawene to undertake the residency, I had yet to comprehend the reality of being a ‘white, European stranger’ in a Māori dominated community and how this would hamper my attempts to engage with local level social institutions such as schools and environmental and political groups. Sadly, all my communications with schools and environmental organisations, initiated months before, were either rejected or remained unanswered. The uncomfortable issue of my temporary presence in the community pivoted around whether I had any right to be in this land and the correlation between my own comfortable life and the dispossession of Māori from their land and culture. Building good relationships to be seen as a trusted and valued visitor would require much longer than the four-week timescale available to me. However, as meeting the community through local institutions was not possible, a small paradigmatic shift that I could make was to open the project up to any level of community interaction by moving my drawing project onto the street. Despite my fear of rejection, this is where the project was able to encounter the very people who wanted to engage, share and exchange their experiences and perspectives.
In terms of evoking connection to the Hokianga landscape I used imagery of the Mangrove as a key compositional frame to help participants feel their way into contributing towards the visual, collective terrain of the drawing. I invited passersby to contribute a drawing or even just some marks if they expressed doubts about their drawing skills. These invitations to contribute were mostly accepted and had cumulative impact as participants displayed the simplicity and openness of the activity to onlookers who quickly wanted to join in. This process induced the creation of a collective visual record of significance and meaning through personal, shared perspectives of daily life in the Hokianga.
Drawing connections — art and dialogue
Collaborative drawing projects produce documentary evidence that can stand in solidarity with people and help their voices to be heard, amplified and validated as worth listening to. It can be a form of visual testimony for the public to connect with as a vision of insight, knowledge and experience of climate change that is both personal and universal.
Lived experience as a foundation for drawing captures what has been sensed, felt, thought about and performed. I wanted this project to open up capacity and dialogic potential so that people would reflect on the impacts that locally experienced extreme weather events might be having on their property, travel plans, infrastructure, supply chains and livelihoods.
While creative projects in themselves cannot alter the impacts of environmental and ecological destruction, they can do two important things. Firstly, they can help to uncover shared emotional connections, and, secondly, they can promote dialogue with different people, especially those who either do not usually comment or are not motivated to speak out and protest environmental calamity and injustice.
Reflections
I had devised this project with the intentions of discovering how people were understanding and responding to the emotional and physical impacts of the climate crisis. Creative public engagement traverses sensitive emotional territory that I felt would need professional input. I had therefore sought support from a range of local organisations with direct connections to the community, such as schools and environmental organisations, thinking that they would welcome me. Yet, reluctance from these organisations to engage with me at any level left me with no choice but to meet the community as a lone practitioner. Surprisingly, this situation seemed to create just the right conditions for encountering the very people who would normally shy away from sharing their personal experiences. Engagement through drawing overcame the usual uncertainty and reluctance to contribute that ultimately facilitated dialogue between us.
I also benefitted from this learning experience as a reminder to ‘trust the process’, but it wasn’t easy. I found myself questioning Why I had wanted to come into this community? and What did I think I could contribute with this work? Over the weeks as I walked between venues carrying the drawing, it was sobering and humbling to develop an understanding that I, the stranger, was carrying the hopes, fears, dreams and wishes of this community on my shoulders. It was the drawing, rather than I, that was the interlocutor.
The finished drawing disclosed a collective visual expression of home by the community, who navigated bicultural differences to uncover solidarity, appreciation and respect for the diverse cultural identities amongst them. It also achieved a restorative function through shared emotional connection to location, place and community expressed through the medium of collective drawing. I hope too that it also reveals some of the complexities of the Hokianga as a spiritual, visceral, domestic, cosmological, ancestral and protected place as I had sensed and savoured it during my sojourn there.
Find more
You can read Laura’s full account of the project via the link at The Hokianga Community Drawing Project page on her website.
Her paper The Hokianga Community Drawing Project: te ao hurihuri (at the end of the beginning) appears in e-publication Drawing Conversations 5: What and Where is Home? edited by Greig Burgoyne and Jill Journeaux.
You can read Laura’s previous ClimateCultures posts on her eco-social arts practice, including ‘What You Need Will Come to You’, where she introduces how her experience in Aotearoa New Zealand helped her explore Kaupapa Māori approaches.
Laura Donkers