Making kin with local woods

In an endeavour to build intimacy with a section of woods as can only be done through visceral embodied experience, a drawing project was embarked upon with the forest as co-author. In sympoesis with the earth as Donna Haraway (2016) proposes, small drawings of selected niches in a local forest were done on regular and frequent walks through changing seasons. Upon completion, each drawing was buried at the site, and was then retrieved on a subsequent visit. The aim has been to bond with a particular wild place through creative dialogue, and through finding and returning to very specific places via animistic sensing and with tacit knowing rather than the customary reliance on human-made indexical technologies to help find the way. The project is the second series of small drawings done of selected niches of forest, and buried or hidden at the site of their creation in an endeavour to come to intimately know a wild place.

This series was created for a visual essay titled ‘Visiting, attending and receiving: Making kin with local woods,’ published in a special issue, (Walking as a radical and critical art of inquiry: Embodiment, place and entanglement), with the International Journal of Education through Art.