More-than-Human Wellbeing

The work with forests is founded in the more-than-human theory and research in which I engage, which acknowledges that humans are always part of assemblages with other living things, non-living things, place and space. I am interested in how people’s knowledges and affective states related to their bodies and states of health and wellbeing are generated with and through their affective and multisensory engagements with forests/bushland and other ecosystems, such as those involving waterways or fungal colonies. I draw on both ‘old materialisms’ (cosmologies existing for millennia in First Nations and pre-Enlightenment cultures) and ‘new materialisms’ (the latest philosophies concerning naturecultures) in conducting these investigations. My approach is interdisciplinary, spanning health sociology, environmental sociology, the health humanities, the environmental humanities, social and cultural geography, and internet and new media studies.

The ‘More-than-Human Wellbeing’ projects are examples where I have explored these issues using creative, arts-based and curatorial approaches and curated an exhibition designed to attune people to their relationships with other species and with place and space in the natural world. The ‘More-than-Human Wellbeing’ exhibition involved working with artists to create artworks for display, with a dominant material being that of recycled wood that showed the markings of its own growth and history as well as humans’ uses of it (Figure 1). We also combined the natural fabric of silk (made by silkworms from mulberry tree leaves) with images combining historical anatomical and botanical prints to reflect the entanglements of human bodies with the plant and fungal worlds (Figure 2).