Eco-Somatic Practice with Soil and Trees

As an artist-researcher I am immersed in questions pertaining to the moving body and imagination, subjectivity and collectivity. My arts praxis involves developing techniques for sensing and moving in good relation with the planet and facilitating embodied processes and arts activities which inspire collaborative stewardship in local communities and experiences which augment our feelings of interconnectedness with the cosmos. My doctoral research places a lens upon the human-animal species as 'biocultural creature' (Frost, 2017) and attunement to the complex cellular processes which offer potential for new ways of thinking and acting for generative futures. Agitating cellular conversations within and between body and environment allows for fluid, reciprocal ways of knowing and connection beyond the spoken word to be present in our response to the ecological crisis.

In documenting practice I use somatic-video methods to capture my experiences moving and sensing the cellular systems of my body in relation to the environment outside my skin. My relational practice moves back and forth between ecosomatic practice and performance, and facilitating socially-engaged ecoarts participation activity. With local communities, most recently in the northern suburbs of Naarm along the Merri Creek, I facilitate ecosomatic experiences which invite people into discovering their singular and collective relationships with trees and urban-nature environments. These practices invite people into playful modes, to prompt creative modes of thought and engagement: to move with weather, create images from listening to the sounds of the flowing creek, dance the patterns of trees, discover textures and language inspired by attuning to human-animal bodied relationships to the cellular self and cellular ecologies traversed. Knowledge is shared regarding the histories and politics of sites and modes of conversation and story are given time to surface for people to find threads of care, connection and stewardship. In collective processes, with my colleagues Emily Bowman, and Ria Soemardjo (Unfurl Collective) we research our relationships to Country in aims of decolonizing thought and finding a path through ecological grief through somatic practices such as 'soil body worlding' which connect us to the vegetal and fungal habitat of trees, clay flute making which asks questions of extractive practices, walking-dancing practices along local waterways which bring us into connection with gravity and our ontogenetic selves. We express our learnings through artmaking, music and the creation of secular rituals.