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Ancient Woodland — A Celebration of Place

Mary Waltham introduces her and fellow artist Jackie Amies’ joint exhibition on their local ancient woodland. Their art invites our curiosity about these rare, ecologically rich areas, which have been largely untouched by human activity since before 1600.

2,150 words: estimated reading time = 8.5 minutes

I can never remember a time in my life when I did not prefer to be outside rather than inside. Growing up on a farm, in a small village in Dorset, the open spaces outdoors in all seasons were my habitat — woods, fields, streams, and ponds. In the past there was much greater human involvement and familiarity with the natural world and I have been fortunate to experience that when young and now, in later life. It enlarges my sense of the world and gives me simple joy. Living now in Selborne, Hampshire and spending large chunks of time walking means that inevitably I am drawn to ancient woodland. Our cottage is 200 yards as the crow flies from Selborne Hanger, an iconic East Hampshire ancient woodland.

Context: Where is Selborne Hanger?

Excerpts from Selborne Local Landscape Character Assessment (2014) are included here to clarify the position of the site.

“Selborne Hanger lies above the village of Selborne in Hampshire. At its apex the Hanger is one of the highest points in Hampshire, 211 metres (692 ft) above sea level. In the image, contour lines are at 10m intervals. The summit and steep escarpment are covered by woods, dropping abruptly to the fields above Selborne.

"The name Hanger comes from the Old English word Hang’r, meaning a steeply wooded slope.

"From any direction, it is Selborne Hanger that commands first attention; the village being hidden from view, nestling some 85 metres below the ridge of the Chalk Scarp.

"The village and its Hanger are synonymous. When inside the village, the Hanger always feels present.”¹

Gilbert White described this place in 1789:

“The soils of this district are almost as various and diversified as the views and aspects. The high part to the south-west consists of a vast hill of chalk, rising three hundred feet above the village; and is divided into a sheep down, the high wood, and a long hanging wood called the Hanger. The covert of this eminence is altogether beech, the most lovely of all forest trees, whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful pendulous boughs. The down, or sheep-walk, is a pleasing park-like spot, of about one mile by half that space, jutting out on the verge of the hill-country, where it begins to break down into the plains, and commanding a very engaging view, being an assemblage of hill, dale, wood-lands, heath, and water.”

— Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (1789)²

In hindsight, I was slow to engage fully and in depth with the significance of ancient woodland that Selborne Hanger and several surrounding areas exuberantly typify. So often when working in London at a demanding role as an executive in fast-paced magazine publishing, I would walk into the Hanger for a break from analysis. Yet always there was this sense of place, including curiosity about all the species that had gone before me. Who were they, what were they doing in the wood and on the Common, and would they recognise it now? I believe so.

“The experience of place and the significance of a sense of place, has never seemed to me simply a matter of sentiment or feeling, but to be something much deeper and more profound.”

— Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2017)³

In recent years as my art practice developed, I met Jackie Amies, another local artist and keen walker who came to an Open Studio I hosted. In the summer of 2024 we began a conversation about making work for a joint exhibition, and we started to cast around for themes that we could both respond to with enthusiasm.

The result was our exhibition Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place at the Allen Gallery in Alton, Hampshire. While each of our art practices continues to develop in appreciation of and response to a variety of habitats close at hand in Hampshire, downlands, wetlands, rivers and chalk streams, for example, why did we choose ancient woodland for this, our first exhibition together?

Showing 'Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place' by Mary Waltham & Jackie Amies, an exhibition at Allen Gallery, Alton 2025. Photograph by Seamus Flanagan 2025 — ‘Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place’ by Mary Waltham & Jackie Amies, exhibition at Allen Gallery, Alton 2025. Photograph: Seamus Flanagan © 2025

Showing 'Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place' by Mary Waltham & Jackie Amies, exhibition at Allen Gallery, Alton 2025. Photograph by Seamus Flanagan 2025 — ‘Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place’ by Mary Waltham & Jackie Amies, exhibition at Allen Gallery, Alton 2025. Photograph: Seamus Flanagan © 2025

Ancient woodland — rich fragments of beauty

Despite best efforts to support and encourage these woodlands to thrive, they are consistently under pressure for development and, of course, from continuing assaults by a range of rapidly evolving tree diseases — such as ash dieback — that are further enabled by a warmer climate year-round. We set out to explore and raise awareness of the many dimensions of beauty of ancient woodland from our own perspectives.

Natural England has an inventory of all 52,000 ancient woodland sites across the UK as an online map.⁴ Looking at the whole map it is clear that many, even most, of the sites are small, fragmented pockets.

And yet, according to the Woodland Trust, “Ancient woods are our richest and most complex terrestrial habitat in the UK and they are home to more threatened species than any other. Centuries of undisturbed soils and accumulated decaying wood have created the perfect place for communities of fungi and invertebrates and specialist species of insects, birds and mammals.”⁵

What is ‘ancient woodland’? It is distinctive and often small tracts of woodland that have been largely untouched by humans since before 1600, and now cover just 2.5% of the UK.

Ancient woods are therefore also a continuing record of centuries of interaction and interdependence between man and woodland, often containing remnants of archaeological features such as wood banks, pits and charcoal kilns.

Ancient woodland is an immensely rich and complex area for exploration scientifically, culturally and artistically. Both Jackie and I feel as though we have only just begun!

Our exhibition invites visitors to the Allen Gallery to be curious about these rare and special areas we are fortunate enough to have access to.

We have used traditional media of paint, fine-art printmaking and photography, but with a twist. Paintings made with soil, and new ways to discover trees are among the interpretations. A gentle woodland soundscape accompanies visitors; we wanted people to have an immersive experience once in the gallery.

A sense of place in art

Jackie is exhibiting fine art prints that focus on trees. How many of us can identify trees from their leaves or bark? A series of twelve monoprints of ancient woodland tree leaves entitled ‘Foliate’ refreshes that lost skill.

Showing 'Foliate' series of artworks by Jackie Amies, in exhibition at Allen Gallery. — ‘Foliate’ series, in exhibition, Allen Gallery, Alton. Artworks & photograph: Jackie Amies © 2025

As does ‘Barking’, a series of tree bark etchings over a coloured lino print. The printed backgrounds are an interpretation of the colours found either in the bark, within the wood or the changing leaf colours.

‘Barking – Field Maple’, by Jackie Amies. Photograph: Jackie Amies © 2025

The mystery of ancient woodland is evoked by the series ‘Rooted’, twelve unique monotypes inspired by a year of walking at Ashford Hanger. Each piece draws the viewer into the steep chalk slopes of the East Hampshire Hangers to gnarled wood, undercut roots and animal paths heading off between majestic mature tree trunks; a world rich in an abundance of life.

‘Rooted X’ by Jackie Amies. Photograph: Jackie Amies © 2025

Painting is my primary medium for this exhibition. I have been working with soil as a paint for the six pieces in the series ‘Ground’, using earth and ash as pigment. The pieces reveal and elevate the aesthetic qualities of ancient woodland soil through their intense colours and textures. As alternative portraits of place, the six Selborne Hanger soil paintings allow the site to speak for itself. They directly reflect the history, the climate and the variety of soils that cover the Hanger.

Showing: 'Ground 1' by Mary Waltham, from the series, Soils of local Ancient Woodland — ‘Ground 1’, Mary Waltham: Soils of local Ancient Woodland, 2025.

“... the soil of any one place makes its own peculiar and inevitable sense. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit.” (Berry, 1977)⁶

“Soil, like fossil fuels took eons to develop and it too cannot be replaced…By giving soil its own agency it is elevated to an aesthetic form.” (Waltham, 2022a)⁷

‘Ground 2’, Mary Waltham: Soils of local Ancient Woodland, 2025.

Soil affects everything that grows in and on it and these woodlands are home to communities of plants that thrive here where the earth is undisturbed and rich in decaying matter. Varied ground flora is a striking feature of ancient woodlands, distinguishing them from recently established woods and plantations. Many of the so-called indicator species of plants in ancient woodland flower in Spring before deciduous trees are leafed out. I am showing eight paintings of such spring flowers using watercolour layers for the series ‘Flos sylva’.

Showing: 'Bluebells', from 'Flos sylva' by Mary Waltham 2025 — ‘Bluebells’, from ‘Flos sylva’ by Mary Waltham. Photograph: Mary Waltham © 2025

My series of small watercolour paintings mounted on cradled birch panel reflects abstract fleeting views experienced while walking the Hangers Way, a long-distance route that runs south from Alton to join the South Downs Way.⁸ This footpath is a good way to encounter ancient woodland, to absorb a sense of the many who have passed here before us, the sound of many species, and if you are fortunate the melody of place. Witnesses all.

Showing: 'Hangers Way', three from the series, watercolour on cradled birch panel, by Mary Waltham 2025. Photograph: Seamus Flanagan © 2025 — ‘Hangers Way’, three from the series, watercolour on cradled birch panel, by Mary Waltham 2025. Photograph: Seamus Flanagan © 2025

Celebrating the local

To help orientate visitors, in the gallery we have a large-scale map of the patches of local ancient woodland we each have frequently visited and worked from, notably Selborne (top of map) and Ashford Hanger bottom).

Showing Patches of local ancient woodland in East Hampshire, from Natural England's online map of Ancient Woodland. — Patches of local ancient woodland in East Hampshire, from Natural England’s online map of Ancient Woodland.

Just outside the gallery, in the small garden, is an installation of a piece of mossy rotting wood with leaf litter. A reference to Neukom Vivarium (2006) from Mark Dion, who says of his work: “So, this isn’t really about the tree, even though the tree is the superstar. It’s really about what’s happening to the tree, about the process of decay…. the wonder of the vast complexity and diversity within a natural system”.⁹

The log is positioned at just the right height for a 7-year-old to look closely and spot all the life teeming on the log through the richness of decay.

A small café at Allen Gallery is the setting for ‘A Celebration of Place’, a series of forty vibrant photographs taken on-site by the artists. These are exquisite reminders of place and a further invitation to find and visit ancient woodland, and to really look.

Showing 'A celebration of place', forty pieces installed in the cafe at the Allen gallery. Photograph by Seamus Flanagan 2025 — ‘A celebration of place’, forty pieces installed in the cafe at the Allen gallery. Photograph: Seamus Flanagan © 2025

Our work on ancient woodland is anchored and guided by generous expert advice from two lifelong landscape professionals who have worked extensively in stewardship and management roles in these woodlands. Chris Webb and David Ball have been in on this exploration of place by me and Jackie from the beginning, providing both of us with essential knowledge, their experience, and facts that have enabled us to feel confident about the truths we present. Any errors of interpretation are entirely our own.

We hope that one outcome from our show is increased understanding of the importance of rare and special ancient woodland.

Responses from visitors have been positive and encouraging – always a plus:

“What an inspiring celebration of place. I have learnt to look at a familiar landscape in an entirely new way”

“A beautiful exhibition to stumble upon. A highlight of my trip to this gorgeous county”

“We loved the birch panel artwork and the moody monoprints. We also enjoyed hearing the birdsong in the gallery as we enjoyed the art. Thank you.”

“Love the birdsong! Inspiring works – love the way the soils are ageing, and the ‘Hangers Way’ watercolour works are enchanting. Thank you.”

Mary’s references:

Selborne Local Landscape Character Assessment (2014)
Gilbert White (1789) The Natural History of Selborne (2006 Penguin Classics edition, edited by Richard Mabey.)
Jeff Malpas (2017) Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (The MIT Press).
Natural England, Ancient Woodland (England) online map.
Woodland Trust, ancient woodland as one of the many woodland and related habitats across the UK.
Wendell Berry (1977) The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Counterpoint).
Mary Waltham (2022a) Case Study: Daro Montag and This Earth. Unpublished.
The Hangers Way, Hampshire.
In this Art 21 interview, “Neukom Vivarium”, Mark Dion discusses his 2006 installation.

Find more

Mary and Jackie’s exhibition Ancient Woodland: A Celebration of Place is on view at the Allen Gallery in Alton, Hampshire until 20th September 2025. There is a free event, Why Ancient Woodland? In Conversation with the Artists, on Saturday 13th September (limited spaces: booking essential).

Mary Waltham

An artist whose work reflects a powerful interest in and curiosity about expressing the fragility of our environment through the eyes of both scientist and artist ...

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.

On Neuro/Queering Nature

Visual artist James Aldridge shares his art and research on neuro/queering nature, helping us all to explore how valuing different perspectives and learning from divergent experiences can expand our ways of seeing and being with the natural world.

2,570 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes

In Spring/Summer 2024 I carried out a residency with SPUD, a New Forest-based arts organisation. SPUD have been supporting residencies by artists who are exploring Queer Ecology in some way, for the last few years, funded through Arts Council England.

In my proposal I wrote:

“I believe that the sensory and systemising differences experienced by Autistic/ADHD people… can provide us with inspirational perspectives and awareness of ecological and social systems, which can be communicated to the wider community through art… I want to promote a valuing of different perspectives and learning from divergent experiences, deconstructing inherited ways of seeing and being with what we have come to call Nature, and developing new models built on dialogue and relationship.”

Titling the residency and the resulting installation Neuro/Queering Nature, I included a forward slash to allow Queer and Neuroqueer to sit together, drawing on both experiences/identities in my research, and in my work with LGBTQAI+ and autistic young people.

Showing the Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition at SPUD, New Forest, Summer 2024. Photograph by James Aldridge © 2024 — Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition at SPUD, New Forest, Summer 2024. Photograph: James Aldridge © 2024

This work with SPUD forms part of my emerging Neuroqueer Ecologies research, which in turn grew out of the Queer River research project, set up in 2020, and about which I’ve written for ClimateCultures in the past.

Neuroqueer Ecologies is a term I coined and an area of research that I have continued to develop, starting with my own experience of places as a neuroqueer person, and drawing on the ways that I experience places and make sense of the resulting sensory information, using my arts practice to map and share my relationship with other beings. In this I draw on the writing of Nick Walker:

“I originally conceived of neuroqueer as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously. It was an extension of the way queer is used as a verb in Queer Theory; I was expanding the Queer Theory conceptualization of queering to encompass the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms…”

Neuroqueer: An Introduction – Nick Walker

Neuro/Queering nature to open up experiences of place

For the Neuro/Queering Nature residency, I wanted to take the trappings of Natural History study and layer them with neuroqueer experience, Neuroqueering the concept of Nature as something that we name, classify, collect, and experience as separate to ‘us’ (us being those humans viewing the world through a Eurocentric lens).

While at SPUD I walked with a river called Avon Water, including the bogs and mires that feed into it, and the marshes that it flows into as it reaches the coast. I drew and wrote with collected clays, recorded sound and video, and set up a camera trap for animals to record themselves.

“Unsurprisingly there are many different types of wetland in Britain. As with the apocryphal fifty words for snow, the lines of differentiation are considerably blurred. Marsh, bog, swamp, mire, fen, carr… The kind for which the New Forest is most famous are known as lowland acidic valley mires… Cranes Moor, Duck Hole and the wonderfully named Slap Bottom: there are hundreds.”

Goshawk Summer, James Aldred

Whilst following the passage of water through these wetlands, I also wrote, drew and applied collected materials onto natural history illustrations taken from books bought in charity shops, layering the ‘official’ images and descriptions with my own immediate response to water, heather, curlew, clay.

Working with the Together, Make Art group (the young people that I mentioned above), and artist Hannah Buckingham, I supported the young artists to explore their embodied experiences of the Forest, and their identities as human animals, through collage, mapping and wearable artwork.

Neuro/Queering Nature was about opening up space to facilitate and communicate different experiences of place, and of what we have come to call Nature, through playful and experimental processes. It definitely wasn’t about swapping one set of rules and classifications for another. I also wasn’t originally planning on working with another river, but water is such a good teacher when it comes to blurring boundaries and cutting across binaries. It refuses to be contained.

In between walking and making, I read a lot, and three books stand out as having informed my thinking and my experience of the New Forest:

1. Goshawk Summer by James Aldred – I was so inspired by James’s descriptions of time spent in the Forest, the exploration of language used to name its different parts, and the way he writes about the Forest as a place that is wild, protected and man-made all at the same time.
2. Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Woelfle-Hazard – I kept returning to passages of this book that looked at rivers from both a queer and indigenous perspective, and from the perspective of beavers or salmon as well as humans.
3. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Champion – a brilliant book which makes so much sense, essentially (this my take on it) looking at the development of the concept of normality, in relationship to human difference, and the impact of models of work and education that prioritise productivity and profit, over wellbeing and creativity.

One paragraph in particular from Robert Champion’s book has stayed with me:

“A radical politics of neurodivergent conservation is also consistent with a radical politics of environmental conservation. After all, it has been the same logics, the same system, that has ravaged the biodiversity of the planet as has sought to eliminate the neurological diversity of humanity…”

Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman

What insights is our society missing from ignoring the voices of autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people?

What if we extend our sense of what is normal and desirable to include sensory and processing differences that might provide us with an expanded awareness of our relationship with non-humans?

Focusing on ‘normal’ ways of seeing and being with the world, that fit within what is understood to be acceptable human behaviour, whilst affirming the human/nature binary, and increasing economic growth no matter what the cost to both human and ecological wellbeing, hasn’t done us any favours so far. In fact I’d say that the inability to directly perceive ourselves as interconnected with the rest of the world is what prevents us from seeing the damage that we are doing until it’s too late.

Holotropism — an experience of oneness

So what can someone like me offer? I’m poking my head up above the parapet a bit here. I’m not claiming that autistic people are the saviour of humanity, or aligning myself with the idea of neurodivergence as a superpower, just that we might bring a different awareness of the place of human bodies and actions within the wider web of life.

Autistic people are often described as being disordered (i.e., not normal). Our differences are medicalised, our abilities pathologised. My experience is that I build up a sense of the world and the relationship of its parts, through being extremely sensitive to sensory information, and by focusing on particular areas in depth. I don’t tend to trust inherited models of understanding the world, and prefer to construct my own from the bottom up. I am also very sensitive to other people’s emotions and intentions, contrary to many people’s preconceptions of what autism looks like.

This ability to focus intently on one subject or one element of experience is sometimes called ‘monotropism’. In addition, artist Hendl Helen Mirra offers up the term ‘holotropism’ to describe an experience of oneness. A sensitivity to everything around you that can be a bit of a nightmare (for me) in a crowded room or shopping centre, but can offer a sense of belonging and a dissolution of boundaries in a less human-dominated environment (e.g., the bogs and marshes mentioned earlier).

“Synthesising monotropic theory with deep ecology and holistic anatomy, we feel we have found a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain under the monotropism map. We are calling it holotropism. This perspective may elucidate the high co-occurrences of synaesthesia, mirror-touch, dyspraxia, and hypermobility among us autistic people.

“To be holotropic is to have wide open sensory gates. To participate in/as the immense world without becoming overwhelmed, we holotropes have two central methods: in, by hyperfocusing our attention on one sensory or cognitive path, and as, through synthesising our experience into coherence. A sense of wholeness occurs through both of these processes — less consciously in hyper focus, more consciously in coherence.”

Holotropism: a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain, Hendl Helen Mirra

More-than-human collaborations for neuro/queering nature

Since my time at SPUD I’ve moved on to new places and opportunities, including a residency with Groundwork Gallery, as one of almost 20 artists taking part in the Ground Up extraction-themed programme this Summer, and now exhibiting at the Ground Up exhibition in Kings Lynn, Norfolk.

Neuro/Queering Nature - showing ‘The Beaver and the Whale' in the Ground Up exhibition. Photograph: James Aldridge © 2024Photograph by James Aldridge © 2024 — ‘The Beaver and the Whale’ in the Ground Up exhibition. Photograph: James Aldridge © 2024

In Norfolk I continued to focus on wetlands, this time looking at the impact of the extraction of animal bodies from wetland and marine environments (through whaling, the hunting of beavers for fur, meat and castoreum, and wetland birds for ‘sport’, feathers and taxidermy).

To make sense of the human impact on wetlands, and how we might collaborate with other animals to reverse some of the damage, I’m currently considering what Neuroqueer Ecologies can bring to inter-species collaboration, how it’s done and what might emerge out of it, in this time of climate breakdown. I’m taken by the term ‘collaborative survival’ used by Anna Tsing, and the potential within ‘passionate immersion’:

“Passionate immersion can take many forms. At its core it involves attentive interactions with diverse lifeways. Beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans…

“Artists have also become core participants in scholarly projects that question conventional approaches to speaking for Nature, exploring opportunities for immersion in the lives of others…”

Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness, Eben Kirksey

Through my Neuroqueer Ecologies research, and inspired by the work of other neuroqueer artists and researchers such as Kai Syng Tan, I’m starting to explore what happens when neurodivergence is decolonised and valued, and in turn impacts upon how we perceive and place ourselves within multi-species communities.

As Joris Lechêne writes in Decolonising Autism:

“The emergence of the conceptualisation of autism (and Aspergers) is ‘rooted in socially constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, disability and productivity, and those notions are connected to the colonial ideas of anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and capitalism’ (Lewis, 2021)…. Furthermore, Quijano (2007) specifies that decoloniality can be understood as the struggle for liberation from all forms of oppressive power that leads to inequality, discrimination, exploitation and domination.”

At the moment I’m exploring how human-beaver collaborations can enable humans to learn from the indigenous, pre-colonial knowledge of beavers, previously hunted to extinction and now being reintroduced to the UK, either unofficially through ‘beaver bombing’ or within enclosures, waiting for the government go-ahead to set them free.

Whilst in Norfolk we visited Wild Ken Hill’s beaver enclosure, and I followed that up with a visit to the Norfolk Rivers Trust beaver site at the headwaters of the River Glaven. I’ve since tracked down my own local Wiltshire beavers, living wild in and around the Bristol Avon, and have been looking at the intersection of human and beaver infrastructure, as beavers re-make places through dam and canal building and the incorporation of man-made structures and materials.

Dams and lodges in Norfolk included a brick and a Muntjac deer skull, and incorporated the ruins of a WW2 sewage treatment facility, whilst those in Wiltshire included a wooden pallet and a warning sign from a nearby construction site. Beavers don’t recognise the perceptual barriers and boundaries that humans often use to divide, order and classify, and as a neuroqueer maker, I feel a real kinship with, and a desire to learn from them.

My work in the Ground Up exhibition represents the beginning of this relationship with beavers. Titled ‘The Beaver and the Whale’, it documents my research into some of North Norfolk’s rivers, and their connection to animal extraction/local extinction and reintroduction.

Showing detail from 'The Beaver and the Whale' (collage and earth from a beaver dam). Groundwork Gallery, 2024. — Detail from ‘The Beaver and the Whale’ (collage and earth from a beaver dam). Groundwork Gallery, 2024. James Aldridge © 2024

It’s not the first time I’ve sought to collaborate with non-humans, and considered the threshold at which such work might appropriately be called collaboration. My photographic series ‘The Ash Looks Back’ for example, informed by research into Ash Die Back Disease, considered the tree’s perspective by strapping camera traps onto ash trees and allowing their community of life to document themselves.

Similarly, my installation at SPUD brought together photographs of animal footprints and camera trap footage of deer, ponies and foxes, with birdsong and river clays, to give a voice to the network of human and non-human inhabitants that makes up the Forest.

“Thinking with beavers and rivers and mountains and salmon, out in the watershed commons, I have sketched a way to transfigure what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls ‘capitalist ruins’ into substrates for new models of life. Practices of world-making with beavers and salmon unveil the multi species commons that is always-already there, in the land, ready for human acknowledgement and recognition.”

Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, Cleo Woelfle Hazard

Find more

This short video shows James’s Neuro/Queering Nature exhibition from his SPUD residency in the New Forest:

And you can explore more at Queer River, James’s practice-led research project, and his website. His previous ClimateCultures posts include A Queer Path to Wellbeing, and he also reviewed for us Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, the book co-authored by fellow member Iain Biggs.

James is showing work as part of the ‘Ground Up’ exhibition until 14th December at GroundWork Gallery, King’s Lynn, England. ‘Ground Up’ is the first of two exhibitions formed out of works of art made in response to a GroundWork residency with the underlying theme of Extraction. A second exhibition, ‘Ground Water’, will run from July to September 2025.

In this January 2024 post for The British Psychological Society, Decolonising Autism, Joris Lechêne offers advice for research and practice drawing on his experience as a trainer in anti-racism, bias, and decoloniality who has lived experience of autism and ADHD.

Hendl Helen Mirra’s July 2023 post Holotropism: a multi-dimensional, spacious, edgeless terrain explores a holotropic experience and perspective of the world.

Nick Walker’s post (2015, updated 2021) Neuroqueer: an introduction describes how the concept of neuroqueering came to inform her thinking, embodiment, and approach to life.

Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness is a 2016 research paper by Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey & Ursula Münster (Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23) that explores “the cultivation of ‘arts of attentiveness’: modes of both paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response.”

For more on the books that James mentions:

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman (2023, Pluto Press) – the publisher’s page also links to a podcast with the author.
Goshawk Summer: A Diary of an Extraordinary Season in the Forest by James Aldred (2021, Elliott and Thompson).
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice by Cleo Wolfle Hazard (2022, University of Washington Press).

And James references the thinking of Anna Tsing, for example in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2021, Princeton University Press).

You can explore the work of SPUD, the arts and education charity where James undertook his New Forest Neuro/Queering Nature residency and which creates opportunities for people to engage with art, architecture, design and the environment; also, the Norfolk Rivers Trust’s The Beaver Project.

You can find more on Kai Syng Tan, the artist and researcher James mentions has inspired his exploration of decolonising of neurodivergence, at her website.

James Aldridge

A visual artist working with people and places, whose individual and participatory practices generate practice-led research into the value of artful, embodied and place-based learning ...

Giving Voice to the Nonhuman

Photographer and writer Joan Sullivan shares her realisation that, no longer content to simply document climate change, a more fluid, non-linear visual language can evoke the nonhuman voice and reflect our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world.

2,300 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.
— Dorothea Lange

Earlier this year, I had the great pleasure to collaborate with a sound artist, Robin Servant, to create an interactive climate change art installation in Quebec, Canada. The result of our collaboration was ‘La voix des glaces’ (in English: ‘Ice Voices’), a multi-sensory installation that gives voice to the nonhuman: the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River.

Sensing the nonhuman voice: Showing a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto photographic ice sculptures, to listen to the underwater 'ice voices' during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES, created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant for the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, Canada, from 24 Feb to 31 March 2023. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023 — Touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto photographic ice sculptures, Edwige Leblanc listens to the underwater ‘ice voices’ during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023

This was the first time that I exhibited my photographs as tactile sculptures. I grouped 24 of my abstract photographs of the rapidly disappearing river ice into eight triangular triptychs suspended from the ceiling in the center of the gallery. Swaying in the natural air currents of the gallery, these ‘ice sculptures’ resembled floating blocks of ice in the Saint Lawrence River.

Sensing the nonhuman voice: Showing a close-up of four ice sculptures at the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant, held at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, from 24 February to 31 March 2023. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023 — Close-up of four ice sculptures at the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023

Each photograph was embossed with braille text from recent IPCC reports. Visitors – both sighted and visually-impaired – were invited to touch the braille relief in a gesture symbolic of our collective blindness to climate change.

By touching my photographs, visitors triggered underwater audio recordings of the ice blocks as they shift and crack from friction, waves and tidal movements. Every time someone touched an image, the gallery filled with haunting, otherworldly ice voices. They destabilize us, pulling us into their evocative vortex, coaxing us to listen more intently. We find ourselves imagining what the ice is trying to tell us.

Sending the nonhuman voice: Showing a close-up of a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant, held at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec, from 24 February to 31 March 2023 — Close-up of a visitor touching the braille text from recent IPCC reports during the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photograph: Joan Sullivan © 2023.

Bringing back the nonhuman voice

Giving voice to the nonhuman has, since 2019, transformed my photographic practice from documentary to abstraction. This shift was triggered by two events. The first (which will likely repeat itself in 2023) was Australia’s 2019-2020 Black Summer – the catastrophic, uncontrollable wildfires that killed an estimated three billion nonhuman beings. I was traumatized by the images of blood-red skies, charred kangaroos clinging to fences, and birds falling out of the sky. I suddenly realized that I could no longer participate in documenting climate change. I felt an overpowering sense of urgency to find a more fluid, non-linear, non-narrative language with which to express my ecoanxiety.

The second event that made me question the role of photography in the Anthropocene was a 2019 interview with the author Amitav Ghosh. Responding to a question from Amy Brady, Ghosh explains:

“I think, in literary terms, the most difficult challenge a writer has in an age of climate change is determining how to give a voice to the non-human (emphasis added). And not just in terms of natural disaster – in general. It’s such a challenge. One writer who has done this very well is Richard Powers. I thought his book, The Overstory, was a huge event because it expanded the boundaries of what writers can do. Now I am asking similar questions: How do we restore nonhuman voices? How do we trace the influence of the human among the nonhuman?”

I had previously read Ghosh’s 2016 non-fiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. But it was his 2019 quote above that inspired me — no, pushed me! — to completely change the way I used a camera. Instead of creating images from my perspective (while hiding behind a camera), I wanted to know how the nonhuman beings in front of my camera perceived climate change, from their perspective. What do they see when they look back at us? What do they feel about our destructive behavior and disregard for nonhuman life? What advice would they offer if given the chance? I was desperate to give voice to these nonhuman beings threatened in the age of man.

This shift in perspective, from the human to the nonhuman, has profoundly changed my art. Since 2020, I have been working on two series of abstract photos: ‘Je suis fleuve’ (in English: ‘Becoming River’) and ‘If I were a tree’. For both series, I have adopted a phenomenological approach in order to embody the nonhuman beings in front of my camera. It’s their story, not mine. If we humans are to survive the coming upheavals, we have no choice but to learn from our nonhuman relatives who were here millions of years before Homo sapiens sapiens first walked the earth. And many of them will likely still be here long after we have disappeared. So it would behove our self-described ‘wise’ species to absorb some of the wisdom from these ancient beings while there’s still time. But in order to do so, we must first slow down. We must learn to listen. We must learn to ‘see’ viscerally with our whole bodies, not just visually. This is embodiment.

A beauty filled with dread

Since Australia’s Black Summer, I have become obsessed with finding non-visual ways to enhance the photographic experience, both for myself (during the creative process) and for viewers (in the gallery setting). Instead of ‘photographing the river or the trees’, I ‘become the river or the trees’ through sustained contemplation and mimicry – moving my body in sync with the flowing water or the wind blowing through the branches. I do this using the technique ICM (Intentional Camera Movement). All of my ICM images are created in-camera; nothing is Photoshopped in post. To date, all my ICM images are single exposures, usually 1-2 seconds long. Through this experimental process, I have learned to embrace chance and mistakes. Most importantly, I have learned to stop trying to control every aspect (sharpness, composition, depth of field, etc.) as I did for 25+ years as a documentary photographer.

Untitled. From the series ‘Je suis fleuve’ by Joan Sullivan © 2023

I describe my new abstract photos as fluid and fleeting. My hope is that these ephemeral images provoke reflection on our own impermanence in a rapidly warming world. An article in a French-language art magazine here in Quebec described my new abstract photos as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (in English: “of a beauty filled with dread”). To me, that’s as close to a perfect description as possible, not just of my photos but also of my state of mind.

Yes, I am filled with dread. Things do not seem to be heading in the right direction; there’s no sense of urgency. But I also refuse to do nothing while we collectively watch the world burn on our cellphones. I counter this dread with a more powerful burning passion: to dedicate every second of my remaining years (15? max 20?) to helping shatter the absurd illusion that Homo sapiens sapiens is somehow separate from and superior to the one trillion other species with whom we share this planet and upon whom we depend for our own survival.

This is what prompted me, in part, to question the environmental impact of my own photographic practice. I started to think about all the toxic chemicals in the inks and photo papers that are used to create the photographic prints for my exhibits. Even for those photos that were never printed, a huge amount of electricity is required 24/7 to store them on my computer, in multiple external backup drives, and on my website. Social media, email, charging camera batteries, and driving to locations also require electricity and energy. Then there’s the undeniable problem of how to dispose of photographic prints (they are not recyclable), not to mention the layers of plastic and stryrofoam that protect them during shipping. I could go on and on…

But it wasn’t until November 2021, during a duo exhibit with the video artist Anna Woch, that I became aware of an even more existential dilemma for a photographer. As I looked at my photos on the wall, a wave of queasiness came over me: I felt strangely uninspired by my own work. Or, I should say, uninspired by the way they were presented: as static, two-dimensional objects hanging against a flat wall, protected behind glass to ensure that no one would damage them. After standing alone in the gallery trying to understand why I felt this way, it finally dawned on me: how absurd it was that these abstract images of the rapidly disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River were considered untouchable, yet we humans are constantly meddling with and disturbing nature. Photographs are ephemeral, just like the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence. Why was it so sacrosanct to protect ‘art’ for decades if the world around us was burning down? What’s the effing point? On the day that I took those photos down, I mentioned to the director of the artist-run center, Philippe Dumaine, that this would be the last time that I exhibited my photographs in the traditional manner, two-dimensionally. I had no idea what my next exhibit would look like, but I sensed that I was standing on the threshold of a new direction in my artistic practice.

A month later, I was sitting at the kitchen table of the sound artist Robin Servant, whom I had heard through the grapevine was collecting underwater recordings of the river ice with his hydrophones. In our early discussions, I had not yet developed a vision for the tactile three-dimensional photo sculptures; that would come much later thanks to the input of several artist friends. But when I first proposed this project to Robin, I already knew that I wanted to incorporate braille text into my photos in response to the rhetorical question “Are we not collectively blind to the impact of climate change?” After many iterations over the next 14 months and in collaboration with the local chapter of People Living with Visual Handicaps, we presented ‘La voix des glaces’ in February-March 2023 at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer in eastern Quebec. Funding for ‘La voix des glaces’ was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Images 10-13 from the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES. Photographs: Joan Sullivan © 2023. 10 A partial view of the installation, made up of eight triangular abstract photo sculptures representing the disappearing ice on Quebec’s Saint Lawrence River. 11 A visitor touches the braille text on one of the eight photographic ice sculptures. 12 A group from the Gaspesie chapter of the Association of Persons with Visual Handicaps visits the installation. 13 Gaëtan Banville, who is blind and a member of the Lower Saint Lawrence chapter of the Association of Persons with Visual Handicaps, reads the braille text from recent IPCC reports embossed onto the eight photographic ice sculptures. Click images for full size.

The response to this multisensory interactive installation, in which visitors were able to experience embodiment of the disappearing river ice by using three of their five senses — sight, touch and hearing — was phenomenal. According to the Centre’s director, attendance at our installation broke all recent records. Especially among the youth. The secondary school students in particular were most captivated by ‘La voix des glaces’. One of their art teachers showed me some of the artwork that her students created after visiting our installation — such incredible abstract paintings, full of energy, movement, and emotion. And yes, rage. It gave me goosebumps knowing that some part of my work resonated with and was internalized by these young people. This gives me hope. We can live with beauty and sadness at the same time.

Showing a publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d'artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec. — A publicity poster for the interactive installation LA VOIX DES GLACES at the Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague in Carleton-sur-Mer, Quebec.

I’m currently working on the conception for a new exhibit in 2024 or 2025 — my most audacious to date — that incorporates elements of ‘La voix des glaces’ but goes one step further. I’ll write about this in a future post.

Hope you enjoyed reading.

P.S. If anyone out there knows Amitav Ghosh, please thank him for inspiring me to experiment using my camera in new ways that give voice to the nonhuman.

Find more

‘La voix des glaces’ — created by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant — was exhibited at Vaste et Vague artists’ centre in Carleton-sur-Mer (Quebec) from 24th February to 31st March 2023. It was supported by The Canada Council for the Arts.

Les artistes remercient le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien financier, et tous ses partneraires pour l’appui précieux : Centre d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Centre VU, Engramme et La Chambre Blanche. / The artists thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, and all its partners for their valuable support: Center d’artistes Vaste et Vague, Center VU, Engramme and La Chambre Blanche.

Le Devoir, Quebec’s largest independent French-language newspaper, published Faire parler les glaces pour montrer que le climat s’effrite, a review of ‘La voix des glaces’, in February 2023. The Vie des arts magazine article that described Joan’s abstract images as “d’une beauté pleine d’effroi” (“of a beauty filled with dread”) is Un vent du fleuve : expositions au Centre d’art de Kamouraska (A wind from the river: exhibitions at the Kamouraska Art Center: 19th September 2020).

You can see more of Joan’s series ‘Je suis fleuve’/’Becoming River’ and ‘If I were a tree’ at her website.

You can read Joan’s previous ClimateCultures post, Deconstructing our Dominion Stories in a Time of Unravelling, a joint review of After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time, by Charlotte Du Cann (2022) and Loss Soup and Other Stories, by Nick Hunt (2022).

The 2019-20 Black Summer in Australia was covered by Reuters in Australia, scarred by bushfires, on high alert for dangerous summer (19th September 2023) and by the Guardian in The black summer bushfires killed 3 billion animals. They are our relatives; they deserve to be mourned (31st March 2023).

Amy Brady interviewed Amitav Ghosh for the Chicago Review of Books: The Uncanniness of Climate Change (18th September 2019). Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable was published by University of Chicago Books.

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.

Walking With the Word ‘Justice’

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reflects on some of the participants’ insights from a workshop exploring the word ‘Justice’. This was the first in the short Environmental Keywords series from the University of Bristol during February and March 2022.

2,900 words: estimated reading time = 11.5 minutes

It was during an online Creative Environments workshop from the University of Bristol last September, led by Dr Paul Merchant, that I first came across his work with the Centre for Environmental Humanities there, and he mentioned the idea of looking at keywords associated with the forthcoming COP26 conference in Glasgow. Later, he brought together a group of interested people inside and beyond the university for an informal exploration and we offered to support the idea of a project. We quickly settled on a short investigation into three words that have complex meanings and usages in different disciplines and contexts and where there is an ever-present risk of groups talking past each other as we grapple with the urgencies and nuances of our climate and biodiversity predicaments.

Paul and facilitator Anna Haydock-Wilson devised a series of workshops and, while I can’t be at the workshops myself, we agreed I should follow up each one with short discussions — by email or Zoom — with the researchers, community group members and creative practitioners who take part. My aim is to explore their insights from the events and their experiences of the different keywords.

As such, this post is not an account or evaluation of the ‘Justice’ workshop or an ‘objective’ overview of that word and its meanings — even less, an attempt at a definition. I hope it’s a fair reflection of some of the things participants have shared with me once they’ve had some distance from the workshop. And that it offers one way in to further conversations on justice, how we talk about it, and its role in helping us navigate our climate and environmental futures. I encourage all ClimateCultures members and other visitors to our site to offer their own insights and responses, ideas and examples.

Fresh encounters

This group’s exploration of the word ‘Justice’ began with a ‘Walk and Talk’ in the Easton area of Bristol. Participants — as local residents, community project workers and activists, writers and artists and researchers — met, shared ideas of justice and made personal notes as they walked, about what this means for them in an environmental context. Everyone then gathered back at the local community centre to share their perspectives on the walk and their own work or involvement with the issues, and split into two groups for a role-playing game. In that session, each group made a ‘justice map’ of the local area to help bring their ideas into focus, before a final discussion together at the end.

Sharing the word 'Justice' - showing the workshop group on its local walk — Easton Walk & Talk
Photograph: Anna Haydock-Wilson © 2022

One of the community participants said of the session as a whole: “It was a great group of people, and I found it really interesting to have representatives from both academic and non-academic backgrounds in the same room and to hear about the different types of work people are doing linked to climate. I would love to find more ways to translate some of the research and work being done into projects we’re doing locally at a very grassroots level. I’m really glad these workshops have begun, and I think there’s a lot of work for us to be doing to make sure the spaces where words like justice are discussed are shaped by people who have traditionally been on the receiving end of injustice.”

Another said: “I really loved that there were people from very different backgrounds there — both cultural and from the work they did and the experiences they had, on all those fronts.”

A third person told me how: “It has motivated me and confirmed a value for what I do. It was good to have different perspectives in a room coming from different backgrounds or professions. I also really enjoyed the game Anna devised with the role-playing — thought that worked well.”

One member of the group shared a couple of strong and, it seems to me, complementary memories from the introductory walk — of “the river Frome overflooding under a motorway bridge” and of “how easily conversation flowed with everybody.” Another explained how “I see the environment as a key factor to enable or disable people being exposed to it. On our walk, we had lots of opportunities to explore this and how this might contribute to environmental justice.” Someone else told me how in “an interesting conversation I remember … I noticed that much of her thoughts surrounded the ‘why’, which I felt was powerful.”

As a prelude to shared conversation within the usual ‘workshop’ environment of a closed room — such as the community centre offered later on — a walk allows for a more open-ended mix of private thought, personal encounter with the local environs and chance conversations with different people one-to-one. In a way, it’s a little like an extended version of that experience when we first arrive at a venue for an event: the bumping into new people at the initial pre-conference tea or coffee, but with the added fuel of fresh air, new perspectives gained out-of-doors and the ever-changing location brought by physical movement. After all, we don’t normally expect to be walking around for a meeting.

The fact that the walk preceded the formal part of the workshop — was actually integral to its design — was clearly appreciated. For one participant, this spoke to a core aspect of our own nature. “Through being active and interacting with the world, particularly walking around, we have a chance to develop new neurons. And our brain, as with other parts of our body, is changing depending on the environment and our interactions. … The physical and the mental go hand in hand and the environment is crucial as it provides the stimulation you need, both on the physical and the mental side.” In this sense, our personal environment — and therefore our shared environment, as social animals — is embodied within us; the boundary between ourselves and the ‘external’ world, where our body stops and the world begins, is not fixed in the ways we commonly think.

“In fact, where our body starts is an interaction between our brain, our environment and our body and the way our senses work to define what is actually around us. We do this all the time. We have to combine what we see, what we hear, what we feel to be able to know what ‘belongs’ to an object, to us, to someone else.”

Here, then, justice starts to have a very direct relationship with personal experience and with being in and moving around a place. But — like an urban river — that relationship can be submerged, can sink out of our conscious mind until a new context brings it to our attention. As one person fed back to me: “The walk made me notice things which I sometimes take for granted, or you just accept them as they are. Like poor, not thought out architecture in this instance. The grotesque wheelchair access at the train station; the motorway. So if an area has been poorly designed, what are our rights to change anything? Things feel so set in stone sometimes, we don’t know we actually have a voice to change things.” Another pointed out how “We have this idea when we talk about disability or inclusiveness, this tendency to restrict it to someone in a wheelchair or who is blind. But that’s more or less it. Anybody else, with all the sensory variability that is out there and all the consequences that has, is not at all considered.”

Our urban and others spaces can design in forms of injustice, as illustrated above: embedded in the ways we become accustomed to think about what should even be part of that design process. While this can be addressed through greater care in new design codes, attention will always be needed to what lies outside the efforts to improve these. You cannot code everything. Standards cannot capture all the ways that our dynamic natural environment and we as diverse humans interact. Like a river, the human and the more-than-human break out and exceed the boundaries and order we try to impose.

A testing ground for conversations

While in some places, some people and communities do find voice and agency — their own ways to make change happen — in too many places many cannot: “I considered the active involvement in a neighbourhood — guerilla gardening in a small patch close to the Bristol-Bath trainline — vs no involvement in the garden/play space square in a concreted-over sad excuse for a playground in a social housing complex.” This participant had spoken with another “about the will or capacity of people to do such things to a space outside their own house boundaries” — capacities that can be bound up with different, perhaps overlapping identities.

“We spoke about cultural differences, about new residents from other countries not wanting to stand out, or draw attention to themselves. I have noticed behaviours before with poor recycling rates, with the problem being the visible bins — where residents did not want their neighbours to see what they consume. There is a social status which needs to be upheld. This is the same for people participating in the flea market as traders of second-hand goods. New residents i.e. first-generation arrivals from other countries, need to prove themselves to others from their own cultures that they are being successful.”

Someone else shared how in the group session another member of the group had “mentioned the word justice terrifies some people. It never occurred to me to think that, but made me make the connexion with my fear of the police. I will be very careful to define what it means to me when engaging in conversation with others. From now on I will make sure that when I talk, ‘Justice’ and ‘Environment’ are together.” A point echoed by another person, who said to me: “It was really useful to connect the word and concept of justice as a focus to the environment. It anchored the importance of the issues for me.”

The word 'Justice' - showing a flooded road under a local bridge — Photograph: Anna Haydock-Wilson © 2022

Another comment gets to the heart of the matter, sharing how in their work with local communities: “a common theme that has come up when speaking with people is how disempowering the language used around climate can be and the negative impact it can have on people feeling that they don’t belong in ‘green’ spaces. Based on that feedback, I’d been thinking about ways we could start working together within our community to build more shared understanding of what the words often used in climate action and decision-making mean, so that more people can use them and the power they hold. When Paul got in touch about the workshop on justice, I was keen to get involved, seeing it as something of a testing ground of how we might begin having these conversations.”

I was sent a link to locally-led research demonstrating how resilient blue spaces are connected to higher quality of life, from which this participant concluded: “so the quality of more greenery around rivers, which we consider good for our wellbeing, would be rather seen in spaces with less deprivation. The justice of the river itself — so majestic round Snuff Mills [a park in the Stapleton area of north Bristol], and in flood it is a powerful beast — to then be turned into a drainpipe and hidden away under concrete for the last bits of its journey into the city. … You feel differently as you follow the river, depending on where it is.”

This also starts to point me to a wider or expanded sense of justice. If environment, body and mind are in relationship within and around each of us and ‘social justice’ contains something of that relationship then — just as where our body ends and the world starts is less fixed than we suppose — justice must encompass something of the wider natural world as well as ‘society’. Something in that phrase, ‘The justice of the river itself’ — a river that has its own life in itself, a powerful beast, and yet is forced into concrete, underground, away from us — speaks to injustice on a more-than-human scale.

Seeing the word 'Justice' - showing a local window with a poster, 'Stop fly-tipping' — Photograph: Anna Haydock-Wilson © 2022

A noun, a verb? In a word, Justice

When asked how they felt about the word ‘Justice’ now, whether this was different since the workshop, one participant said “It feels a lot closer to the bone,” while I’ve already quoted another: “From now on I will make sure that when I talk ‘Justice’ and ‘Environment’ are together.” A third person shared that “I would say that justice used in this climate conversation felt very complex. Already all intertwined, decision-making done with consideration to every living being and their livelihoods is ‘Justice’.”

A further response suggests that a process such as this walk-and-workshop itself is an enactment of what we are seeking: “That’s for me ‘justice’: the listening, the learning and the working together.” And what flows from that might be something that retains a diversity, that “we would start to think of whether we can develop what we call almost a shared mental model … where we know which angle we are coming from but we have an understanding of where they might all fit together. And then instead of having a fixed outcome, rather think of it as a theory of change; how can we change these things and move together to something that is more just, more resilient?”

To appreciate the ‘angle we are coming from’ and how others’ paths intersect, converge, overlap our own, is an expansion of our own map, our mental model, into something larger and shared, although always incomplete. Two conversations gave me different impressions of an area I’ve never visited but can imagine from my encounters with other places I’ve lived or worked. Different but, importantly, not necessarily conflicting — and both speaking of injustice.

One was an email where a few lines provided almost a prose poem: “the trainline with lots of freight trains, high pollution in a local neighbourhood; the architecture at the train station; graffiti and street art; River Frome, DIY skatepark; the lack of green in neighbourhoods, pocket parks; then finally the council estate with a concreted over play park. Had a few trees, but I was surprised and shocked actually at such a loss of opportunity.”

The other came during a Zoom call, reflecting on the same scene as “On one hand a very sad space but on the other almost an amazing space, when you think about the way the youth make it their own. The dumped sofas, the building rubbish and rubble and whatever, integrated as obstacles into the skatepark; the graffiti going over them as if they are becoming part of the landscape; the ceiling of the M32 with an enormous graffiti, it’s the skeleton of an animal, which brings in almost the life and the change of all these things. The River Frome then going over its edges, going onto the car park, where it can come out and starts to become a river again. So all that is to see how nevertheless life takes over. The walk to the train station there, the little path where the flowers break out to try to get their own space. That’s actually really nice. And I think that by gentrifying that area that community would lose a lot. That’s where justice comes in again: how do you approach such things without destroying what the community creates to survive? That was one of the things where I hadn’t appreciated just how much they’re making that space liveable for them and useable.”

I also saw something of this possibly creative tension between different ways of living in, of seeing, the same ‘environment’ in what another person shared as one of their strongest memories of the event: “the feeling that some areas, particularly those with lots of graffiti, gave a harsh feeling to the area. As graffiti is a huge part of Bristol’s character it’s not a question about removing it but more about offsetting it in the areas it’s the most prominent by revitalising playgrounds and greenspaces.”

Fencing in the word Justice: showing a graffiti area behind a barrier — Photograph by a workshop participant © 2022

Maybe a vision of justice might be something fluid, able to move with people and environment and the others we share it with. And part of that flow might be to recognise not just that justice must include the many and the diversity that we are and share, but the seemingly conflicting forms and appreciations of what is ‘good’.

What does the word ‘Justice’ mean to you?

Find out more

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Environmental Keywords is a short interdisciplinary project at the University of Bristol, investigating three keywords — ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’ — that are common in the environmental discourses that shape how we think of, talk about and act on the ecological and climate predicaments facing us.

With funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, the project is led by Dr Paul Merchant, Co-Director of the University’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, and involves colleagues from different departments and disciplines, as well as local community groups, ClimateCultures members and other creative practitioners.

The project focuses on three workshops in Bristol, facilitated by Anna Haydock-Wilson complemented by online content here at ClimateCultures:

‘Justice’ — Wednesday 16th February 2022
‘Resilience’ — Wednesday 9th March 2022
‘Transitions’ – Thursday 24th March 2022

You can find out more at our new Environmental Keywords section, including the suggestion to explore an ‘undisciplined glossary of our three keywords: do let us have your thoughts, questions suggestions and examples via the Leave a Reply box on this post or via our Contact page.

Mark Goldthorpe

An independent researcher, project and programme manager on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses to our predicaments.