Collaboration Archives - Page 3 of 17 - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

We Are Creatures – a Story of Mayhem with Masks

Artist and writer Nicky Saunter shares her recent photographic exhibition and the artist-activist collaboration that brought the wild into our city streets, revealing humans as creatures in a world that allows less space than ever for the natural.

1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

Back in the mists of time during the first pandemic lockdown, I became involved with a bunch of local creative people who were also into drumming and protesting about climate change with Extinction Rebellion. As a small group of enthusiastic activists based in a small west Somerset rural town, we were conscious that if we were to invest the time, energy and money in travelling to London to join other protesters, we should make it worthwhile by making as big an impact as possible. Hence the idea to make big animal masks that would transform us into creatures other than humans. We wanted to take nature into the protest and chose to become native animals that we saw in our countryside.

We are creatures: supported in a web of life

Sadly, today there is often more wildlife in cities and towns than in our increasingly sterile and denuded landscape. We rarely see large mammals such as foxes, insects are few around sprayed crop fields and amphibians are struggling with a lack of ponds. A study published by Buglife in 2020 showed that insects are in steep decline worldwide – with an average loss of over 8% per decade. Studies using other methods have produced even higher figures for insect population decline of over 2% per year. And we cannot survive without insects, for they form a critical part of the global food chain and maintain the soils we need to grow our food. There are some long words in the pyramid chart below, but you get the message: we need a lot of insect life at the bottom in order to support our food system at the top. For example, three-quarters of our food crops depend on insects for pollination. Without them we won’t survive for long.

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
– Rachel Carson (Scientist and author of Silent Spring, the book that brought the dangers of pesticides to the general public in the 1960s.

Source: Buglife, ‘We are losing 9% of insects per decade’ https://www.buglife.org.uk/news/we-are-losing-9-of-insects-per-decade/

Here is a BBC Ideas film that explains it really well too – and with beautiful animation and a voiceover by the brilliant bee man Dave Goulson: Why insects are so crucial to life on Earth | BBC Ideas.

With the help of a fellow local artist, Jenni Dutton, who is extremely skilled in both creating and teaching, we made a range of masks that went on parades, demonstrations and protests around the country. It is amazing what can be made from corrugated cardboard boxes, newspaper, glue and paint. From the fox to the frog, the owl to the dragonfly, these creatures came alive and danced and drummed alongside the humans. They brought a little of the wild into our city streets. It felt like a reminder of our ecological crisis, which was often forgotten in the headlines of carbon, energy and climate. After all, humans are just one of the many creatures affected by climate change, although we are the only ones to have caused it.

Protestors draw attention to falling biodiversity. Photo: Nicky Saunter © 2021

When people disappeared

There is less space than ever for wildlife in our world today. More concrete and less earth, more chemicals and fewer insects. In the pandemic, without the endless noise of machinery and traffic, many of us heard the birds again and some experienced the dawn chorus for the first time. People saw some strange and wonderful sights as animals wandered fearlessly into spaces usually occupied by humans, like car parks and city streets. Security cameras caught bemused-looking deer wondering where the humans had all gone. It was surprising how quickly the wildlife found its feet and began to use paths and places long abandoned to people.

We talk endlessly about our need for connection with nature, but it feels as if this is always on our own terms. The wild is fabulous in the right place at the right time, leaving no mess and creating no inconvenience for humans. Mud must stay in the field — although of course it runs down the road as the rate of rainfall increases and blocks our drains. Weeds must stay out of gardens so that plants we choose to call flowers can flourish, since they might be weak and easily overcome if left to fend for themselves. Animals that are potentially dangerous, from the snake to the wolf, are banished, hunted, slaughtered in a range of grisly ways and treated as unworthy of life in comparison with humans. Creatures that we find unappealing or are too good at surviving alongside us and our mess are designated as ‘vermin’. I wonder if — according to the data of who is a real danger to who and how much filth they each create — if we aren’t perhaps the ultimate vermin. Superrats even. After all, we are also creatures.

Wearing an animal mask for a street protest was an interesting experience, as from inside we could see the reactions of people around us. Some laughed, lots took photos, many smiled and children often waved or held out their hands. Recognition was immediate and response warm — something animals help us to do is to connect with each other, perhaps? I think of the ease with which dog walkers start conversations and even become friends with someone they would otherwise just pass in a park or street.

Black and white

There is something about monochrome photography that gets to the very essence of a thing. I don’t know why this is, but time and again, I see the impact of black and white images cut through the constant colour and clatter of today’s busy world and strike at the heart of the matter. This is particularly true of portraits, and therefore my choice to make a series of monochrome photographic prints of people wearing animal masks at night going about their business in our local small town.

The very first image was a take on the Beatles album cover on the zebra crossing at Abbey Road. It was a cold winter night and we had fun arranging ourselves artfully across the road, only to have to scuttle out of the way when cars came along — just like real animals. The final image was both funny and poignant too — people-creatures trying to claim back some space in our world.

We are creatures: Showing 'Crossing the zebra' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Crossing the zebra. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

I went on to take a series of ten images, imagining what might happen at night in a town as creatures show their faces in our human spaces. They are strong, confident and do not seem frightened of us. Have they come to take over? Or are they our almost forgotten selves walking the streets as we lie sleeping in our beds? Some are funny, and others are creepy or disturbing.

These images became part of an exhibition in a studio at East Quay in Watchet, an amazing art venue created by a local group of people called The Onion Collective. The main building houses national exhibitions, often with a local connection or collaboration, while several containers outside house artists’ studios. My exhibition was in one of these, loaned by the Somerset conceptual artist Jenni Dutton.

We are creatures: Showing 'Barn owl and ivy wall' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Barn owl and ivy wall. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

We are creatures: Showing 'Frog in the launderette' a photograph by Nicky Saunter. — Frog in the launderette. Photograph: Nicky Saunter © 2025

One of the things that visitors commented on most was how the combination of my statement and photos challenged their view of their own connection to nature. As we are in a rural area, many people recalled the pandemic quiet and how they took walks and saw wildlife differently — and how that had disappeared again so quickly once ‘normal’ life resumed. I had written about how my images intend to ask us to think differently about ourselves as animals and about the rest of the natural world that surrounds us and yet remains invisible in our daily lives. We see a beautiful vista, the blossom on a tree or enjoy the sound of birdsong, but rarely notice an ancient lichen, a pondskater on a forgotten pool or the perfection of a dandelion seed head. Our filters are set by our culture, which values some things randomly over others. Most of them need challenging.

Nicky Saunter is a writer and artist who uses mostly monochrome photography as part of her practice. She focuses on emotional connection to issues of the day, from women’s rights and colonialism to water pollution. She often features nature and in particular the wildlife of Somerset. More of her work — including the We Are Creatures series — can be seen at Through the Window.

You can read the Buglife report Nicky mentions in this April 2020 post at their site: We are losing 9% of insects per decade.

Nicky mentions multimedia artist Jenni Dutton and you can explore her work here. And you can find out more about the work of the Onion Collective, a place-based social enterprise in the small coastal town of Watchet in Somerset, “working to reconfigure economics from the perspective of our attachments to community, culture, nature and the future we hope for.”

Nicky Saunter

A practical activist, campaigner, social entrepreneur and artist with a particular focus on communication, between people and between humans and the rest of the natural world.

River / Run – Waterbodies from Dorset to Findhorn Bay

Poet and campaigner Fiona Moore finds joy and celebration alongside loss in fellow ecopoet Helen Moore’s river / run, a collection of long-form poems exploring a living ecology, history and language shared with waterbodies and our fellow animals.

1,930 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

NB: If reading on a phone, you might want to allow it to rotate the page and read as landscape rather than portrait, to maintain the format for the excerpts from the poems.

If a river is long-form water, then a long poem can run like a river. Ecopoet Helen Moore has written a trilogy of long-form river poems, set in Dorset and north-east Scotland. They explore ecology, history and language, and the plight of Atlantic Salmon. (I’ll follow Moore’s practice of capitalising all living beings.)

But is river ever singular, or is that a superficial, simplistic human concept, foreshadowing exploitation? Here’s what the river networks say in the poem ‘Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / weal’:

Don’t call us ‘river’
            as if we were singular - 
                 a blue, serpentine line on a map,
                                    an ‘s’ from source to estuary;
                                                                  an abstraction                       
                                                  to be navigated, straightened. 
                                                                  fished, dredged.

Opening a book of ecopoetry, even the most ecologically minded reader may think: will I feel preached at? Moore deftly avoids this in the passage above by allowing the water to speak and question our assumptions. The reader may also ask: will dread overcome me, or will there be some joy? river / run contains joy in the energy and diversity of water, its inhabitants and landscapes, alongside the dread and the pain of loss.

Showing the cover of 'river / run' (2024) by Helen Moore, published by Cape Farewell Books. Artwork by Animate Earth Collective — ‘river / run’ (2024) by Helen Moore, published by Cape Farewell Books. Artwork: Animate Earth Collective

Findhorn – northern flow and flight

Joy also comes from the liveliness of the text – the varied, energising forms it takes, and the way description engages all the senses. Moore crafts her poems to embody riverine flow and eddy. The writing has a kinesthetic effect, if that’s the right way to say you feel it’s moving you along (often fast) and around. I found this most effective in the opening poem, ‘Findhorn Bay: Waves of Flow & Flight’. Even on a map this bay, east of Inverness, is an astonishing landscape. The poem begins “Tide pouring into the Bay as if through the neck/ of a wineskin -” and shows the impact:

Incoming waves flowing past boatsheds, The Captain’s Table, 
houses hunched against north-east winds -

           down past the Kirk, rippling over sand- & mudflats,
           brine filling the rough-stitched ‘Gut’ of salt-marsh,
           swelling it with the wine of Life.

It’s a largely benign flow, but hugely powerful; the poem doesn’t need to remind us explicitly how destructive water can be, as part of the forces we’re letting loose while we fail to address climate emergency.

Showing 'River Findhorn', photo by David Buckland 2024 — River Findhorn. Photo: David Buckland © 2024

The wineskin metaphor’s a rarity, all three poems being mostly deep in the ‘real’ world. As well as the movement of tide, rivers and burns, ‘Findhorn Bay’ describes two long journeys and a short one, first the ancient migration of Wild Salmon “sacred to Picts & Celts”, with “Miocene eyes”. Their route is extremely challenging, “from furthest Atlantic… through kelp forests, storms, gyres,” until the “leaps of faith” as they struggle upriver in Scotland. But

For every hundred Salmon that leave our rivers now,
less than five return.

river / run includes photos by David Buckland, one depicting Wild Salmon infested by Sea Lice, spread by fish-farm escapees. It’s painful to look at.

Pink-foot Geese take the second journey, and the poem shifts from the speaker’s viewpoint on ground

& the sky suddenly wrinkled, filled with tremulous lines
as if the weathermen had pencilled in the air-waves,
these marvellous patterns converging on the Bay.

Hairs on my skin rise spontaneously to meet them,
& in my chest, heart is a full crimson sail.

to imagining their summer in the far north and migration route back to Scotland, “following star-maps in their brains”. Apart from the “dragon flare of gas at Sullom Voe” these passages are exhilarating (heart as a sail, another rare, wonderful metaphor) until, arrived at Findhorn,

A dozen Pinkfeet stir, 
    beating hearts, 
  lifting, honking....

                                                  Pop! Pop! Pop!
                                                  Explosions of shots
                                                  ring out, shattering the calm -

a slaughter begins. The unexpectedness delivers a jolt. Loosely indented text is shocked into two columns, straight-justified: geese dying on the left, shooters opposite. The anger comes through, and we’ve been flying with the geese and share it.

  Most shooters travel
  long-distance for ‘action’
  they film & boast
  on YouTube channels - 

  600 miles to Findhorn Bay
  GREAT SPOT
  FOR SPORT - - - - - - -

The narrative turns to the human inhabitants’ perspective, from strongly against to appreciating the income the shooters bring, and the rights (or not) of Nature.

Showing Pictish stone carving of goose and salmon in the National Museum of Scotland, 7th Century. Photo by Helen Moore © 2024. — Pictish stone carving of goose and salmon in the National Museum of Scotland, 7th Century. Photo by Helen Moore © 2024.

All this is done in three pages with a lot of white space for the reader’s own thoughts. The whole poem is only 12 pages long: rich in descriptive language and packed full of references, yet concise. Its last, short journey is a farm-to-farm route that Findhorn fishwives used to take, trading herring from their creels for cheese, eggs etc. It’s written in short prose paragraphs – a walk, at human speed. “Who are the descendants of these tough women? What tenacity of character, what knowing in their blood?” This idea of instinctive, inherited knowing likens the women to Salmon or Geese. The speaker’s rucksack becomes a creel:

... will a future culture come to honour Nature’s teachers, incise Goose & Salmon in their hearts? In my creel I’m placing all the man-made rubbish. There is no place for it in this cauldron of Life.

Nature and culture – an ecopoetic palimpsest

‘Findhorn Bay’ was written for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival. The other two poems were commissions from Cape Farewell, centring on Dorset river systems, as part of the RiverRun project “that connects Cape Farewell’s scientific partners with local farmers and artists… [on] the poor state of freshwater”. All three poems are divided into sections with titles, to help the reader follow the structure.

Showing The Wye x4. 40cm x 40cm mixed media. The canvases were immersed and part created by the River Wye over a period of weeks. Art: Jim Murray. — The Wye x4. 40cm x 40cm mixed media. The canvases were immersed and part created by the River Wye over a period of weeks. Art: Jim Murray

In her introduction, as well as helpful context for each poem, Moore explains her method: an interdisciplinary, collaborative, intuitive approach, with “roots in animistic European traditions”, alongside “gleanings” while out in Nature, engagement with scientists and others, and research into the many aspects of a landscape from geology to social history. She describes how from all this “the writing ferments and emerges as a poetic palimpsest”. When you read the poems, this makes perfect sense – and so it does that, she says, they take a long time to write. Other writers can imagine what the work might involve: choosing which material to use and how, ordering it, editing down and down, touching on themes often just in a short phrase, trusting the reader to do the work and make connections.

‘Dorset Waterbodies’, the middle poem, takes varyingly indented forms, all across the page, to score the rhythm. I particularly liked the sections where other voices speak: the water (see opening quote) and its creatures. In ‘Nightmare slurry spill’, Fish and industrially farmed Cows speak in a loose pantoum, whose semi-repeated lines convey a powerful sense of claustrophobia: the Fish can’t breathe, and “Overcrowded Cows… feet in piss & shit” are unnaturally confined. As a whole, I wasn’t quite as swept along by this poem as by ‘Findhorn Bay’, but that’s by a very high standard. The introductory section, describing a visit to Durdle Door, captures a sense of post-lockdown relief, though empty cruise ships are “squatting the horizon… ticking over” (the filthy bunker fuel, the emissions, the waste!). It celebrates the new tourists’ diversity:

                & crowds of colour           break
                                                                the monotony
                                   of white, rural         m o n o c u l t u r e s.

Moore uses spaced-out letters to emphasise a few key words in this poem. I stumbled over these; maybe that’s the intention, but I’m not sure they add to what the form and language already do.

The poem ends with the river (“if you must make us ‘river’”) making the case for human respect and restoration, “the right to self-determine”. The descriptions of river life are beautiful, from Dippers and Dragonflies to Waterweeds to

                                       our single-celled beings
                                                 constellate    like s t a r s ...

The conclusion might have more impact in performance, perhaps less so on the page, however fervently we agree:

                                          let’s be communities of diverse voices
                                with a common future.

                                          A communion of subjects & one 
                                                             Commonweal

This kind of writing is so, so hard to do, even in a riverine voice – which, here, seems to shift a little from river towards human.

Dorset – southern spells and celebration

‘Edge of Wild River’, the third and shortest poem, begins with a dream of a Salmon. Moore explains in the introduction she dreamt it while living in difficult circumstances in Sydney, with the terrible 2019/20 bushfires raging. The Salmon collides with her, “like being struck by a waterlogged pillow”. “What has she to say?”

Apart from the dream, in prose sentences with breaks, this poem is all written in short-lined verses, left-justified. The tone is song-like, spell-like, as if to will a different future into being. In ‘Water Blessing’ voices ask for forgiveness for pollution:

We this grey wreckage 
dumped on the bend in spate;
we the old bones of trees,
the breeze, swimmer, floating leaf ...

Human healers are celebrated: the scientists, litter pickers and amateur water testers. Ecologists studying water samples and counting River Shrimps

                                            listen 
to sounds from underwater hydrophones - 
eerie bubbles, clicks, and echoes
bouncing off the sterile walls -

Showing 'Dart, 2018' - still from the performance film by Hanien Conradie — Showing ‘Dart, 2018’ – still from the performance film by Hanien Conradie.

In a 2022 interview Helen Moore gave to Kathryn Alderman, on the Ink Sweat & Tears website, she was asked if there’s a difference between nature poetry and ecopoetry:

“Ecopoetry for me is all about consciousness. Consciousness of our deep interconnection with our planetary home and of our humanimal nature. Awareness too of the paradigm that has created our disconnection in Western cultures, and the power structures that have a vested interest in maintaining our disempowered state.”

river / run puts these principles into action, but subtly, using the power of description, form and language. ‘Edge of Wild River’ ends with a couplet that sums up the book’s passionate message [poet’s ellipses]:

as we help wild river heal,
so we help and heal ourselves ...

Find more

Helen Moore’s river / run (2024) is published by Cape Farewell Books. Cape Farewell produces opportunities for artists, scientists and communities to work together: “by creating art founded in scientific fact, our projects highlight humanity’s destructive impact on the earth and inspire people to act towards a sustainable cultural shift.” As Fiona explains, two of the book’s poems form part of Cape Farewell’s RiverRun project, which interrogates the environmental impact of the way the Dorset land is farmed, and the impact on the rivers and waters that feed Poole Bay.

You can explore more of Helen’s work at her website — where you can also listen to her reading Findhorn Bay, Waves of Flow & Flight, the poem created for the Findhorn Bay Arts Festival 2018, with a soundtrack by VisionSonic.

Helen Moore is also a member of ClimateCultures and has written posts for us, including The Start of Something Going Wrong, her review of fellow member Joanna Guthrie‘s collection, Her Whereabouts. In The Ghosts of Fleas, her post for the Finding Blake website, she shares and discusses her poem inspired by William Blake’s 1819 painting, ‘The Ghost of a Flea’.

Fiona mentions Helen’s Ink Sweat & Tears interview. You can read that here.

Fiona Moore’s collection, Okapi (2024) is available from Blue Diode Press, and you can find her on Instagram at fionamoore555.

All images from the book, river / run. The final image is a still from a film by ClimateCultures members, Hanien Conradie and Margaret LeJeune. You can read Writing on Water, Hanien’s post discussing the film of her performance in the River Dart and reading Afrikaner poet Eugene Marais’s Diep Rivier.

Fiona Moore

A poet, editor and environmental campaigner, whose second book, 'Okapi', is a book-length eco-poem. She has edited issues of Magma Poetry on climate change and islands.

Solidarity in Place: The Hokianga Community Drawing Project

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.

Showing First marks, Women's Health event. Photo by Laura Donkers 2023 — First marks, Women’s Health event. Photo: Laura Donkers © 2023

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.

Showing Mangrove at Rawene. Photo ny Laura Donkers 2023 — Mangrove at Rawene. Photo: Laura Donkers © 2023

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.

Showing Drawing workshop on the street outside Village Arts, Kohukohu, Northland. Photo by Laura Donkers 2023 — Drawing workshop on the street outside Village Arts, Kohukohu, Northland. Photo: Laura Donkers © 2023

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.

Showing Drawing workshop at No1 Parnell Gallery, Rawene. Photo by Denis Orme 2023 — Drawing workshop at No1 Parnell Gallery, Rawene. Photo: Denis Orme © 2023

Showing Drawing in progress. Photos by Laura Donkers 2023 — Drawing in progress. Photos: Laura Donkers © 2023

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.

Showing the ompleted drawing at The Church, Rawene. Photo by Laura Donkers 2023 — Completed drawing at The Church, Rawene. Photo: Laura Donkers © 2023

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.

Showing Laura Donkers carrying the completed Hokianga Community Drawing on the Kohu Ra Tuarua vehicle ferry between Rawene and the Narrows. Photograph: Pania Greene © 2023 — Laura Donkers carrying the completed Hokianga Community Drawing on the Kohu Ra Tuarua vehicle ferry between Rawene and the Narrows. Photograph: Pania Greene © 2023

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

An ecological artist and researcher connecting people with ecology through community projects and outdoor art workshops to inform more creative and sustainable ways to live.

Living Waters, Sentient World & Co-operative Inquiry

Writer Peter Reason explores the possibilities of learning to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives, finding ways to invoke the living presence of a sentient world through co-operative inquiry with humans and waterways as participants in a kinship ecology.

1,890 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

How can those of us enculturated into a Western worldview engage with our world as sentient, as responsive, as kin? This is the question we address in Living Waters, our series of on-line co-operative inquiry workshops involving both human and River persons; the next workshops run online from 11th March to 29th April 2025 and usually attracts an international participation (see below for registration details).

In these inquiries we have been asking questions of the kind:

What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?

These questions focus our attention on whether we experience our world as something ‘out there’, which however wondrous and valuable is nevertheless separate from humans; this is the taken-for-granted perspective in Western society. Or is the world an animate presence, experienced as kin, as “all our relations”?^[1] as do my Indigenous and Settler colleagues in Western Australia, who write in ‘Seeing, feeling, and hearing the world’:

… the ways we see, feel, and hear the world is associated with how we relate to and respond to our places. If we see the ground we walk on and the places we live in as animate, responsive, and relational, we are highly likely to care for Country with love, gentleness of spirit and fullness of heart. We are all able to hear and participate in the music, the soundscape of our places – to honour and celebrate the lyrics of life’. ^[2]

This way of seeing allows Indigenous people in their traditional cultures to experience the places they live – places their people have inhabited for tens of thousands of years – as living and responsive, with the whole community of beings as participants in a kinship ecology. These Indigenous elders draw on words that don’t translate easily, if at all, into English – pirlirr in Walmatjarri, liyan in Nyikina, and wirrin in Noongar – words that refer to a visceral way of knowing shared by people, all beings, and land itself. Through this way of seeing, feeling, and hearing Country, people know that “when you care for Country, Country will care for you”. ^[3]

When we use the terms Country (capital C), Land (capital L) or River (capital R) we refer to a broader, stronger, Indigenous use of the English language concepts of country, land, and river. These terms refer to places as relational, animate socio-ecosystems that are living and responsive. Country, Land and River include people as participants in a kin-centred ecology of being.

Sentient world: showing a brook in Wiltshire. Photograph by Peter Reason — By Brook in Wiltshire. Photograph: Peter Reason © 2023

Beyond brute matter

Those of us socialized into a Western way of being have been taught to think of humans and nature as separate and mutually exclusive opposites. In Western culture, although some of the ‘higher’ mammals are credited with intelligence, by and large the other–than–human is experienced as brute matter, only of value in so far as it serves human purposes. This perspective is clearly in error, as it has proved to be astoundingly destructive of the quality and complexity of the planetary ecology. Can we Westerners find this quality of relationship, can we learn to see our world in the way of kinship? Writer Amitav Ghosh entreats us to listen once more to the voices of the more-than-human world:

Voices that have stubbornly continued to insist, in the face of unrelenting, apocalyptic violence, that nonhumans can, do, and must speak. It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that those nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it. ^[4]

Living Waters inquiries are based not only on Indigenous perspectives but are rooted also in Western philosophy, specifically contemporary ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ which has its roots in the writings of Spinoza. We understand our world not as inanimate ‘stuff’ but as imbued from its origins with some kind of innerness – call it mind or sentience. Everything is integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. And from this we see that all beings form a communion of subjects, reaching out to each other in mutual contact and communication, co-creating a ‘poetic ecology’: the fundamental erotics of being touched by the world and touching it in return. If we invoke a world of brute stuff, as is normal in Western society, then that is what we will experience. If we invoke the world as sentient presence, we may be graced with a response – as the living world configures itself on poetic, metaphorical response to our invocation, a process Freya Mathews refers to as ontopoetics.

Showing the tonfluence of the Wiltshire Frome with the Bristol Avon. Photograph: Peter Reason © 2023 — Confluence of the Wiltshire Frome with the Bristol Avon. Photograph: Peter Reason © 2023

Co-operative inquiry with the more-than-human

The point of our inquiries is to learn to unhook ourselves from taken-for-granted perspectives and to explore ways of invoking the living presence of a sentient world. This is where Cooperative Inquiry comes in, a profoundly democratic approach to learning about and making sense of our world. This approach to living inquiry has three central characteristics that make it profoundly suitable for panpsychic inquiry because it treats all those involved – human and more-than-human – as subjective self-directing beings and therefore as equal participants in the inquiry process. It also emphasizes the experiential ground form of knowing, and it asserts the primacy of practice.

In orthodox scientific research the roles of subject and researcher are mutually exclusive, the researcher contributes the thinking that goes into the project, the subjects contribute the action to be studied. In co-operative inquiry these exclusive roles are replaced by mutual relationships. All involved work together both as co-researchers and co-subjects. Everyone is engaged in the design and management of the inquiry; everyone contributes to the questions to be asked and how to go about exploring them; everyone participates in the experience and action that’s being explored; everyone is involved in making sense and drawing conclusions; everyone draws on the learning from the inquiry in their future practice.

Sentient world: Showing swans on the Bristol Avon. Photograph by Peter Reason — Swans on the Bristol Avon. Photograph: Peter Reason © 2022

So how does this apply to the Living Waters workshops? We start with each participant identifying a River or waterway near where they live which they can engage with as a living, sentient being. They may sit with or walk by River, offering it quite simply attentive love. This can evolve into ceremony, gift-giving, song, prayer, always addressing River as a living being, always attentive to River’s response. We ask participants to compose accounts of their experiences and share these with an inquiry group of about six of their fellows; and periodically through the eight weeks of the workshops we work as a whole community of about twenty human persons to identify themes and shared questions. These cycles of inquiry are punctuated by seminar sessions at which the faculty offer perspectives on a view of the world as sentient – living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory – which may inform the inquiry process.

Personal encounters – towards a sentient world

About one hundred human and River persons have participated in this inquiry process over the past four years. Our encounters with Rivers drew forth a wide range of responses, both inner and outer.

For many co-inquirers the initial challenge was to get over the internal voices that questioned the whole activity – this even though they joined the inquiry sympathetic to its aims. We all needed to quieten our minds and hush our expectations sufficiently to give fuller attention to River. Many found themselves at first distracted and self-absorbed.
Once inner voices were somewhat quietened, it was still easy to drop into a traditional subject-object relationship, to look at the river as still ‘out there’.
However, with persistence, practice, and support from the human inquiry community, most were able to sustain a feeling of sentient presence, and then move into what one group called ‘getting in the zone’. This is the experience of a sentient, embodied world, and of one’s own animal body as part of it; usually accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure and gratitude, maybe wonder and enchantment at the sheer beauty of it all.
Going deeper, there sometimes arose a curious juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary; and close to that a profound feeling that the ordinary is all extraordinary.
Some inquirers also developed a complex imaginative or psychic response, as if the world is somehow ‘speaking’ directly in words and images. In time, many participants found themselves ‘slipping under the psychic skin of the world’ or ‘lifting the veil’, with the illusion of separation slipping away.
Finally, there are on occasion active ontopoetic responses, ‘moments of grace’ when the world and its beings actively gesture back in response to invocation: animals and birds appear; there is a gust of wind or a shower of rain; leading to narratives of experience incontrovertibly linked to one’s invocation.

Sentient world: Showing Offering to River Fowey. Photograph by David Peters — Offering to River Fowey. Photograph: David Peters

Many participants report experiences of a sentient and responsive world that are deeply felt, unassailably authentic. Such experiences have an authority of their own. They offer intimations of a world quite different from the materialist, brute world into which we moderns are socialized. As an outcome, our metaphysical assumptions are radically re-arranged. It is evident that experiences of a sentient, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility.

Notes

[1] Linda Hogan (1995), Dwellings: A spiritual history of the living world (originally published by Simon and Schuster, 1995; 2007 edition by W. W Norton & Company. )

[2] & [3] Kankawa Nagarra Olive Knight, Anne Poelina and Sandra Wooltorton, Seeing, Feeling, and Hearing, and the World.

[4] Amitav Ghosh (2021, John Murray. P.57), The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis; italics in original.

Find more

The next iteration of the online Living Waters co-operative inquiry runs from 11th March to 29th April 2025.

Peter mentions several perspectives on the living world that the Living Waters inquiries draw on in their Cooperative Inquiry seminars: living cosmos panpsychism, biopoetics, place-based ecology, Gaia theory, Ontopoetics and narratives of experience. Peter has written extensively on these approaches, including Learning How Land Speaks and at his website.

In Peter’s previous post for us, Bristol Climate Writers Presents … ‘Desert Island Books’ — a collaborative piece with fellow members of both ClimateCultures and BCW on fiction and non-fiction books they discussed at a public event — he talks about – Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis by Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, and The Overstory by Richard Powers. He also contributed Lines Written While Reading Hunger Mountain to Day 4 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic. And with his Songs for Earth, featured in our Creative Showcase, he asks: How does one sing in the face of the ecological crisis — the disruption of the process of life itself, permanent loss of evolutionary complexity, permanent endings of patterns of being?”

Peter Reason

A writer linking the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on scientific, ecological, philosophical and spiritual sources and participatory perspectives.

‘If I Were a Tree’: Notes for the Pyrocene

In her new exhibition, photographer Joan Sullivan is haunted by a recurring question, “If I were a tree, what would I feel when the flames arrived?” — and confronts the Pyrocene as the world heats to record-breaking levels.

1,610 words: estimated reading time = 6.5 minutes

My new installation, ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ (in English: ‘If I were a tree’), is the second in a series of immersive artworks that give voice to the nonhuman. It is currently on display at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada, until 20th December, 2024.

Notes for the Pyrocene: Showing IF I WERE A TREE at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada. Photograph by Joan Sullivan © 2024 — IF I WERE A TREE at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

While my previous installation, ‘La voix des glaces’ (in English: ‘Ice Voices’) focused on the disappearing ice of Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River, ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ focuses on the fires threatening Canada’s boreal forest. In both works, I cede my voice to the non-human beings (or nonhuman people, as invoked by the philosopher Timothy Morton) with whom we share this magnificent planet.

Black Summers

What would these nonhumans want to tell us before they disappear forever? Would we self-described ‘wise’ humans even be willing to listen to them if they could speak? I became obsessed with these questions in early 2020 following Australia’s ‘Black Summer’ wildfires that killed an estimated three billion nonhuman beings according to scientists.

It was this enormous loss of nonhuman life (rarely mentioned by the media) that pushed me over the edge and changed my artistic practice forever. I could no longer justify using my cameras to document climate change from a human perspective. I felt compelled to learn how to use my cameras in new ways to ‘see’ climate change from the perspective of nonhuman beings threatened by a rapidly warming world.

As described in my earlier ClimateCultures post, Giving Voice to the Nonhuman, Australia’s devastating wildfires triggered my transition away from 25+ years of documentary photography towards a more fluid, non-narrative form of artistic expression. But it would take another three years of research and reflection before the concept for ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ crystalized in my mind: an imaginary forest of burning trees in the middle of a gallery.

Notes for the Pyrocene: Showing "Forest burned in 2018, located north of the tiny crossroads of Labrieville near Lac Pipmuacan, witnessed in October 2024 during my trip to Nitassinan to visit the Innu of Pessamit". Photograph by Joan Sullivan, 2024 — “Forest burned in 2018, located north of the tiny crossroads of Labrieville near Lac Pipmuacan, witnessed in October 2024 during my trip to Nitassinan to visit the Innu of Pessamit.” Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Gallery – Images 1 & 2: “Forest burned in 2023, also located north of Labrieville near Lac Pipmuacan. These were also taken in October 2024 during my trip to Nitassinan, to visit the Innu of Pessamit.” Click on images to enlarge.

In 2023, three years after Australia’s fires, Canada experienced its own record-breaking wildfires that scorched all 13 provinces and territories. By mid-July 2023, there were already 29 megafires burning out of control, each larger than 100,000 hectares. The region where I live – on the southern shore of the Saint Lawrence River in eastern Quebec – was not directly affected by these fires. But we all looked anxiously across the river at the dark ferruginous skies; we all breathed its toxic fumes. Maybe next year would be our turn.

Throughout that summer, I was haunted by a recurring question: “If I were a tree, what would I feel when the flames arrived?” The first half of this question became the title of my current installation.

Gallery – images 3 – 8: from the ongoing series IF I WERE A TREE. “Imaginary photos of the Pyrocene: the age of megafires. Using the technique ‘Intentional Camera Movement’, I move my camera in an agitated manner to imagine a tree on fire. This image was created ‘in camera’ in one single exposure; no images in this series have been manipulated in Photoshop.” All photographs: Joan Sullivan © 2024 Click on images to enlarge.

I imagined myself rooted to the ground, like a tree. I tried to embody the anxiety of a sentient being unable to flee. Using intentional camera movement (ICM), I moved my body in an agitated manner to imitate the flames fanned by high winds whooshing through the parched forest. The resulting images oscillate between representation and abstraction, underscoring our collective ambivalence to the escalating ecological-climate polycrisis.

Fifteen imaginary trees ‘on fire’ were printed on silk fabric, each nine-feet long (2.7 meters). By sewing the two longest sides together, I transformed these two-dimensional prints into three-dimensional sculptures that resembled tree trunks. These tree trunks were then suspended from the ceiling, creating a hanging forest ‘on fire’ in the gallery space.

Inspired by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, I invite visitors to wander through this silk forest to touch the trees ‘on fire’ while listening to their voices through the music of my friend, James Darling. Can immersive experiences like this decenter ourselves and create empathy towards nonhuman people upon whom we depend for our own survival? According to Eliasson, “It is necessary to unlearn how we see in order to be able to see with our bodies.”

IF I WERE A TREE in exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Welcome to the Pyrocene.

2023 was the hottest year ever recorded in human history, and scientists are “virtually certain” that 2024 will be even hotter. But 2024 will most likely be remembered as the first full calendar year to breach the 1.5℃ limit above pre-industrial levels established in the COP21 Paris Agreement. A dubious honour, a stark warning.

Even Brazil’s Pantanal – the world’s largest wetland – is on fire. And ‘zombie fires’ have become a thing, at least here in Canada.

Welcome to the Pyrocene – the age of mega-fires

Each artist will respond in his or her own way to this unfolding drama. As a visual artist struggling with ecoanxiety, I have found solace collaborating with other artists, musicians, scientists and even an association representing people who are blind or partially sighted to create tactile and acoustic installations that help us to ‘see’ climate change in non-visual ways.

I am particularly drawn to musicians for collaborative research and creation, especially those projects that give voice to the nonhuman. In my experience, these collaborations have resulted in visceral experiences for the public that resonate at a much deeper level than just a selection of my photos on the wall.

In the small city where I live, I have had the good fortune to collaborate with two brilliant musicians for my two most recent installations, ‘La voix des glaces and ‘Si j’étais un arbre. For the latter, I commissioned the cellist James Darling to compose music that gives voice to the trees threatened by approaching flames. I have long wanted to collaborate with a cellist — the cello being the instrument closest to the human voice. Its low bass notes have the potential to resonate within the human body. Might this be a way for some visitors to experience, possibly for the first time, embodiment with a nonhuman being?

James Darling performing ‘Artefact’, composed for the IF I WERE A TREE exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec. Photograph: Katia Fournier © 2024

Inspired by my imaginary photos of burning trees, James created ‘Artefact’, a 13-minute sound sculpture rich in textures and harmonies for 16 cellos. Its title makes reference to archaeology, i.e., objects created by human hands that are left behind and discovered much later. This enigmatic work incites visitors to question what they want to leave behind for future generations.

In addition to the imaginary silk trees, ‘Si j’étais un arbre’ also includes several branches and tree stumps that were burned in the 2018 and 2023 fires. In late October 2024, I crossed the Saint Lawrence River by ferry to visit Nitassinan, the ancestral land of the Innu of Pessamit. With permission from Innu elders, I collected several burnt branches to travel back with me to the south shore of the Saint Lawrence to be included as sacred ‘artefacts’. Mélanie Bellefleur, an Innu Territorial Guardian with the Council of Innu, crossed the Saint Lawrence in November to offer one of these burnt beings during the opening.

Burnt branches from the Nitassinan forest fires in the IF I WERE A TREE exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Finally, two weeks after the opening, I met, quite serendipitously, the choreographer and performer Martine Cardinal. On her first visit to the gallery, Martine felt a strong connection to the silk forest and immediately accepted my invitation to improvise during an upcoming cultural mediation session with the public (which you can watch below). Her performance was breathtakingly beautiful and fleeting.

Like Canada’s boreal forest.

Notes for the Pyrocene:: Showing IF I WERE A TREE in exhibition at Galerie d'art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec - with performance by choreographer Martine Cardinal to soundsculpture 'Artefact' by James Darling. Photograph by Joan Sullivan © 2024 — IF I WERE A TREE in exhibition at Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent, in Rimouski, Québec – with performance by choreographer Martine Cardinal to soundsculpture ‘Artefact’ by James Darling. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2024

Find more

‘Si j’étais un arbre’ (‘If I were a tree’) is on display at the Galerie d’art Léonard-Parent in eastern Quebec, Canada, until 20th December 2024.

You can read Joan’s earlier ClimateCultures post, Giving Voice to the Nonhuman.

The Pyrocene is explored by Steven J. Pyne in his book, The Pyrocene
How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (University of California Press, 2022). In his blog on the term, Pyne says “I coined the term Pyrocene as a catchphrase in a 2015 essay titled ‘Fire Age’ published in Aeon. Since then I’ve started using it regularly, and in 2019 began to propose it as an informing principle (in a literary sense) by which to understand the world our pact with fire has made. I have long regarded all of the Holocene as an Anthropocene. From a fire perspective I now regard the Anthropocene as a Pyrocene.”

Fellow ClimateCultures member and photographer Alan McFetridge has also explored the Pyrocene in his work, Landscape Fire in the 21st Century.

Joan mentions philosopher Timothy Morton in reference to ceding her voice to nonhuman people. There is a review of his book Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People (Verso, 2017) in The Guardian: Humankind by Timothy Morton review – no more leftist defeatism, everything is connected.

The quote from Olafur Eliasson — “It is necessary to unlearn how we see in order to be able to see with our bodies.” — is taken from the essay Olafur Eliasson: Interdisciplinary Approaches and their Interplay with his Art by Else Marie Bukdahl, in The Journal of Somaesthetics, No. 1 (2015).

Scientific American was one of many journals that published the finding that 2024 will most likely not “just be the hottest on record—it could be the first to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius“, as announced by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

‘Si j’étais un arbre’ was supported by a generous grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

L’artiste remercie le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien financier, ainsi que le Programme Transformer l’action pour le climat (TAC) à l’Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR).
The artist thanks the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, as well as the Transforming Climate Action (TCA) Program at the University of Quebec in Rimouski (UQAR).

Joan Sullivan

A photographer, writer and farmer who focuses on climate change and whose abstract, phenomenological approach to photography expresses her ecoanxiety and gives voice to the nonhuman.