Visiting, Attending and Receiving: Making Kin with Local Woods

My research is in arts-based ecological learning. As an artist-scholar and teacher in a faculty of Education, I explore how aesthetic, contemplative and arts-based work done in direct relation with local ecologies opens ontological avenues that help us better understand - on deeply personal levels - what a regenerative future might entail. As a personal relational practice, I spend much time walking in my local forest on the ancestral lands of the Katzie, Kwantlen and Sto:lo nations, east of Vancouver in western Canada. I’ll share here examples of arts-based projects related to these forests. The accompanying links go directly to specific projects there, or to image-based articles.

In the project, Visiting, Attending and Receiving: Making Kin with Local Woods (Vasko, 2021) I sought to deepen my relationship with the local forest through a practice of drawing done over a series of many walks. I engaged with inquiry into sympoesis (Haraway, 2016) where the multi-species place became part of the artwork, a kind of co-author. Once each small drawing was completed, it was buried in place; I then searched for and retrieved the drawings on subsequent walks, giving respect to the organisms who sheltered the drawing. My aim was to sense the multi-storied lives of the place, to listen for perspectives of more-than-human kin.

Through my practice of regularly walking in this treescape for over a decade, I have seen the rainforest ecosystem much affected by climate events and change in recent years. Noticing, for example, the effects of prolonged drought on indigenous forest plants led to Drought Patterns, a work where I inquire into gentler ways of everyday living and being in harmony with the local ecological relations. Storms that uprooted trees led me to noticing their Root Shadows; in this work I traced with care the journeyed growth of roots that were forced into light rather than nourishing the tree from the hidden below earth. And, endeavouring to give closer attention to dynamics of weather in my local ecosystem, I undertook a project titled Inner and Outer Weather: Creative Practice as Contemplative Ecological Inquiry (Vasko, 2020), which involved drawing the bark of trees in my neighbourhood so as to become sensitive to their skin, and the way our own human skin forms the barrier between our inner psychic weather that is in turn inevitably affected by the weather without.

Ecological awareness is a foundation woven into all my teaching. I share my inquiry into ecologically sensitive pedagogy in a forthcoming article titled “On being part of an ecological community: Relational ways of being and classroom dialogue as foundations for ecological sensitivity and response-ability."

References
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Vasko, Z. (2020). Inner and outer weather: Creative practice as contemplative ecological inquiry. PRISM, 3(1). https://ljmu07a0101.cs.ulcc.ac.uk/prism/article/view/351
Vasko, Z. (2021). Visiting, attending and receiving: Making kin with local woods. International Journal of Education through Art, 17(1), 45–53. https://doi.org/10.1386/eta_00050_3
Vasko, Z. (2024). On being part of an ecological community: Relational ways of being and classroom dialogue as foundations for ecological sensitivity and response-ability. Holistic Education Review. (In press).