Equitable Making with our More-than-human Kin

Introduction

I am fully admitting to feeling a little overwhelmed and stuck since losing the clarity and focus that my MA offered, since graduation almost six months ago. I work well with self-defined briefs within an external structure and since I feel like I’ve kinda been floating. Or more accurately, treading water within a sea of ideas!

My head is way too full with (what I think are) good ideas and interesting avenues to explore – but as it’s causing me more stress than excitement, I feel like I need to take a step back a bit and get my thoughts in order in a more critical context. 

During my MA, there was this pattern of diving into theory by writing a critical, researchy thing, to which you’d then respond to and explore creatively. Then you would use those artistic responses to inform another deep-dive researchy thing, which would then inform your next round of making. And so on. And that way of working really aligned with how I naturally think and process things so I found it super helpful. I’ve had about a year of making since I did my last deep-divey research thing and so I believe it’s a time to take contextual stock and see what the next making period has in store…

I shared this article with my Fish collaborator and bezzie Jill Howitt to have a look through before publishing, because she’s an amazing editor and thinker (love you Jill). She posed an interesting and valuable observation – the first of many in this article. She said “The above reminds me of the way painters describe working – intuitively/spontaneously maybe almost unconsciously followed by a period of observing and analysing the work more consciously. For some artists this involves working with the painting flat and horizontal on the floor – then placing it upright and vertical to observe it. I wondered if you similarly alternate between doing and analysing/contextualising – unconscious and conscious?”. I think you’re right Jill – that is very analogous to what I’ve been doing.

She also said “That made me think… can you be in it and observe it at the same time? I notice your phrase – ‘step back’ above. What are you stepping back from and to?”. She’s so good at posing questions! I suppose I’m stepping out of my mental swap and identifying a route forwards… whatever that route might be. I think you can be in a space or place and observe it simultaneously. Isn’t that what mindfulness essentially is?

And thus here we are! This piece of writing is an opportunity to connect my MA research and practice to the projects I’ve been more recently involved with and onwards to future directions and collaborations. I write this both as a memory-jogging exercise for myself and a guide for others on how to make work equitably with and for the benefit of the more-than-human community. My angle is about artistic practice… but the values, principles and ideas can be applied to all sorts of other climate-adjacent areas – such as sustainability and climate resilience planning, agriculture and gardening, ecoliteracy / education, nature-based wellbeing. 

Everything that follows is a reflection of how my thinking has developed as a result of my own theoretical and practical research over the last 18 months. I begin with definitions, context, and explanation of human:more-than-human collaboration. This is followed by a series of guidelines that for ethical ways of working with our more-than-human kin – which, again, grew out of research and practice. I then explore the difficulties and contradictions of establishing an ethical code from a human perspective before reflecting on the importance of intuition, receptiveness, and listening to this field.

Kinship and Kompassion

The research during my MA was centered around equitable and ethical creative collaborations between humankind and the more-than-human. I shall do my best to give a overview of what I mean by that.

I originally wrote a literature review titled ‘The Geopoetics of Drawing’, which started off as a simple investigation into how drawing might support environmental activism but evolved into something much more complex (for the better, I’d say). I explored so many things in that paper…

The main thing I moved forwards with was the concept of Kinship Ethics, an environmental philosophy first offered by Aldo Leopold in 1949, in which a kinship felt with the Land drives moral responsibility to defend it. ‘Land’, by the way, doesn’t just refer to the geological makeup of the Earth but rather everything organic in nature – the soil, the trees, the water, the animals, the plants, the sky… everything.

By accepting that the Land is an active co-creator of knowledge (Barrett, 2014), we can easily accept that it possesses an autonomous voice which is able to shape its creative agency. Demonstrating/exploring this agency through collaborative artmaking helps us to see the Land as being someone akin to us – autonomous beings with needs and wants. It helps us to recognise shared characteristics and shared origins and with that developed kinship comes care and compassion. And with that care and compassion comes a sense of responsibility to protect it and motivation to actually do something to support it. This is an ecoliterate transformation from which moral duty, moral action, and a sensitivity to the needs of the Earth arises (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, cited in Coleman, 2016, p.88).

WTF are HNHCCs?

I creatively and contextually investigated the notion of what I coined ‘human:non-human creative collaborations’ (which is a mouthful so from here we’ll refer to them as HNHCCs) and how to go about them in the most ethical, equitable and kindest way possible. HNHCCs, in short, refers to the creative coming together of at least two natural entities, beings or phenomena, one of which must be human. These creative unions help to centre the voices of the more-than-human and develop a sense of kinship to the Land within humans, as described above. 

It is easier to collaborate with animals than it is plant, mineral or other natural phenomena – possibly because we share so much physiology – but HNHCCs can be explored with any number or types of Being. Perhaps even metaphysical ones on a supernatural plane – but that’s an essay for another day!

HNHCCs are really exciting philosophically (Magrane 2015) but could also go a long way to helping humankind to develop a revolutionary level of respect for other species (Jevbratt 2010).

After exploring HNHCCs in a practical sense it became very apparent to me that creative collaborations with other Beings could so easily tread into exploitative, harmful, spectacle, controlling, disempowering, manipulative territories – as it has been historically (in ‘art’ but also in life). So I looked into what ethical art-making in the context of HNHCCs meant. I wrote a journal article on the matter, Ethical Art-Making – Human:Non-Human Creative Collaborations, and exhibited some of the ethical-collaborative explorations in my MA exhibition ‘seeds of change’.

It’s these ideas, which have been threaded through and interwoven with a million other thoughts, ideas, and experiences over the last year, that I want to articulate and build upon a bit more in this paper.

I’ve been reflecting a lot upon the practical ways in which I can ethically collaborate with more-than-human beings. I recognise that – as a human – I am always going to have some sort of position of power over most non-human beings because I am a product of the Anthropocene and live within a world manipulated in favour of my species. I cannot deny or remove my privileged position in the network of our shared realities, but I can work to a set of standards that feel more equitable and kinder to the assortment of more-than-human Beings that I genuinely do give a shit about.

How to be horrible

Before I define what I believe to be ethical approaches and methodologies to artistic HNHCCs, let’s remind ourselves what we define to be unethical. I couldn’t find much literature about ethical collaboration with our plant or mineral kin, as compassion for the Land only seems to extend to animals. But we can use this as a base from which to build a standard that applies to all our more-than-human brethren. So I’m going to lift a whole paragraph from my journal article (Ha! Take that academia!):

“Whilst non-human beings have been creatively acknowledged, it is typically to use them as material or symbolic interfaces to produce something reflective of the ‘artist’s intentionality, intuition and interpretation’ (Cypher, 2017). Live animals appear ‘primarily as muse, motif, material, model and medium’, ‘consumed as exhibition pieces, manipulated as objects of study or pure spectacle, rendered as material or anthromorphised’ (Ullrich, 2019). They may also experience captivity:restraint:control, use human tools when ‘working’ in human environments, or made to engage in human behaviours without understanding the human context. In this way, non-humans frequently have their creative agency dismissed, anthropocentrically patronised or manipulated by artists (Ullrich and Trump, 2022).”

Following some contextual exploration, practical manoeuvring, and serious reflection, I’ve built upon this to define a series of unethical ways of ‘collaborating’ with the more-than human. I put collaboration in quotation marks because in these instances it’s not collaboration at all but exploiting human power over others.  Below I offer a list of unethical making practices, with examples from well-known artists. Many of them are interlinked and have varying levels of severity so it’s challenging to put everything under a neat little header or in order of ‘badness’, but unethical methodologies include:

Obvious harm

I don’t want to go into this too much because it honestly hurts my heart too much to think about… but this is the obvious abusive stuff that anyone with a soul would agree is harmful to inflict upon another living thing; physical abuse, fear, neglect and so on. It also, for me, includes ripping up ecosystems and to some extent – killing off plants.

Tearing up the landscape. Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1976) Running Fence. [Heavy woven white nylon fabric (Installation)]

Exploitation

Using the image, labour or other ‘desirable’ quality or ability of a more-than-human collaborator without recognition and fair recompense, slavery, working without the best interests of the non-human collaborator.

Not working in the best interests and exploiting the trees ‘labour’. Penone (1968) It Will Continue to Grow Except at this Point. [Bronze installation]

Control

Captivity, restraint, displacement, forcing ‘productivity’, manipulating behaviour through fear or harm.

Capturing a wild coyote and trapping it in an art gallery. Beuys, J. (1974) I Like America and America Likes Me. [Performance, Documentary Photographs, Film].

Manipulation

Training a more-than-human being to use human tools, forcing unnatural behaviours or human-centric behaviours without understanding human context, forcing unnatural development/growth, rearranging or training for human aesthetics, anthropomorphism.

How can this cat be expected to understand this human context? Schneeman, C. (2008) Infinity Kisses. [Film].

Disempowerment

Faffing too much with a HNHCC in a way that minimises their creative agency, imposing human aesthetics, deciding a work has ‘failed’ following a collaboration, centering them as merely an object or ‘spectacle’, making no effort to communicate the parameters of a collaboration, going/forcing ahead with a collaboration when there’s been indications that its unwanted.

Faffing and imposing human aesthetics. Goldsworthy (2013) Sycamore leaves edging the roots of a sycamore tree [installation].

If we agree that these are indeed unethical approaches to working with more-than-human collaborators (even where there might be other ethical methodolgies present in the same work – for example, sustainable materials), then we can agree upon a set of principles that help minimise the level of harm, exploitation, control manipulation or disempowerment experienced by those we’re trying to advocate for.

Principles of equitable collaboration

This section isn’t quite so complicated, as it’s purely about being kind, discursive and respectful in the same way you’d empower a valued friend or treat a professional collaborator. In short… don’t be a dickhead. 

Before we go further, however… I’m hoping that it doesn’t need saying that it’s just as important that we work equitably with our human communities just as much as our more-than-human communities (and vice versa).

By equity, we mean that not only do we not discriminate on race, colour, ethnic or national origin, religious belief, migrant status, political opinion or affiliation, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, age or disability (and for us, also species, type or biome)… but we also recognise that we don’t all have the same privileges (due to intentional or unintentional bias or structural discrimination) and address these imbalances by meeting needs so collaborators (human or otherwise) can engage fully. 

As a participatory artist, I find myself always taking time to see the people I work alongside as the individuals they are, celebrating their strengths and ideas, understanding their needs and trying to minimise barriers as far as possible so they can shine. I don’t understand why this caring, empowering approach typically stops with our species? Imagine what could happen if this sense of support and care was extended towards our more-than-human community too.

By synthesizing literature and direct experience, I have come to some key conclusions. I list them below with some examples from my own practice (I’m not saying I’m super-ethical compared to the baddies listed above, by the way, it’s more that I can better think of tangiable examples from my own work). The principles that inform how to ‘not be a dickhead’ when making collaborative work with our more-than-human community include:

Friendship

Interactions should be respectful, discursive and empowering. Really approach more-than-human collaborators with the same level of respect, supportiveness and curiosity you would approach a human artist friend of yours with. Be respectful of their existing needs and priorities and don’t assume you take priority in that moment. Build relationships, don’t ask or expect too much too soon, and respect what they choose to share with you. 

Me and Merlin the pup developing our relationship in the early days.

Natural Behaviours

Never ask a more-than-human collaborator to do something that it wouldn’t naturally do. Respect and value their natural abilities – you don’t need to make them do anything different so avoid pushing collaborators beyond their natural behaviours and capabilities.

Drawing in collaboration with the wind.

Recognition

Acknowledging that more-than-human collaborators are on equal footing with you – there’s no room for archaic biblical hierarchies here. Engage with them as equal co-creators whose work is valued – even when they inevitably play the role of an anthropocentric, artist-ego-extending tool – and recognise their strengths and limitations in art-making. Also recognise your assumptions, your projections and your position in the network. Acknowledge their role in the wider ecosystem and be respectful of their needs, cycles, behaviours, priorities and attributes (remember that most Beings hunker down and rest in winter, be mindful of nesting season, and avoid poison plants!)

How does one select an image that depicts ‘recognition’ ffs? But this is from a moment of being hyper aware of the wider ecosystem and recognising my place within it.

Agency

Collaborators should be free to exercise their agency, including to refuse. Minimise the levels of control or manipulation as far as you can and support them to make their mark as freely as possible. And they may not want to collaborate with you, or at least not on the terms you are proposing, so actually respect their decision. In some instances this might be immediately obvious (a cat settling down for a nap instead of playing with you) but other times it may require patient, intuitive listening. For example, you might feel a strong sense of ‘no’ in your belly when asking a river to collaborate, or a push away from a certain area of land – both real life examples. Once I asked a tree to make work with me and eventually felt a firm ‘no’ coming from it… yet a wild sense of ‘Me! Me! ME!’ from another nearby tree. So I went over. Or maybe you have an expectation and it just doesn’t happen. An absolutist rule here is to follow what your gut is telling you, and to be patient with Beings like trees, rocks and landscapes; they exist a lot longer than we do so it’s reasonable to expect their sense of time to be slower than ours.

I wanted Osiris to play and chase after this dangly toy I offered him. But he wanted to rest. So instead of forcing him to perform for me, I respected his choice to just lay and watch… which became the artwork.

Recompense

There must be a generous ‘giving back’ within the means available to you. End extractivist conditioning and only giving when it equals increased ‘yield’ for you. Offer food, water, acknowledgement, thanks and love to nurture Beings for it’s own sake, as well as in exchange for collaboration. Try to hear what it needs and help them out. Or in the case of spoilt pets or indoor plants who already need for nothing in this world (like mine), give them a cuddle and offer something to the more-than-human community in the wild instead.

An offering to the local deer family.

I fully acknowledge that what I say will resonate with a number of people, yet sound a bit too ‘woo’ for others to take me seriously. I actually don’t like the word ‘woo’ because it’s used as a derogatory term that incorrectly dismisses a lot of spiritual, intuitive or indigenous cosmologies into the realm of nonsense and psuedoscience, and labels people with related belief systems as stupid, gulliable or ‘mad’. But is there even a neutral word for ‘woo’ in the English language that isn’t full of judgement? That itself, I think, is telling. I say nothing from a place of theology but from a place of love… whilst also not being arrogant enough to think that human science has all the answers. Our collective arrogance is already truly proving to be our downfall as a species.

One way for all you cynics out there to see it is: if I’m wrong, there’s no harm done and ecoliterate responsibility is still nurtured. Whereas if I’m right (and there’s more and more hard evidence coming out that supports this position) and we continue to act in the unsustainable, colonial, exploitative manner that we in Western cultures are so accustomed to, we continue to remain unsustainably extractive and disconnected from the Land we undeniably need in order to for our species to survive. 

It pays to be open-minded, open-hearted, and take an ‘and/both’ approach to these sorts of things. Just ask Starhawk (1999, cited by Morgain, 2013, p.296).

Eco-sensitive collaborative methodologies and examples

Right, so we’ve established approaches to making HNHCCs that are either mean or respectful. And so the big question is, and the reason that I started writing this essay so I could list them for myself… what does ethical collaboration look like in practice? What processes and approaches allow us to make work from this equitable perspective?

Again this list, with its practical examples, is borne from a synthesis of literature and my own practice-led research and investigation, and some definitely raise more ethical complications. I imagine there’s more opportunities for HNHCCs that I haven’t yet discovered, but I think this is a good reference list. 

Decay and destruction

Bury. Submerge. Mould. Rot. Erosion. Nibbling (them, not you).

Lauren Saunders (2022) Collaboration with Earth [Ink and soil on paper].

Naturally occurring chemical and physical processes

Evaporation. Sun-bleaching. Rust. Crystalisation. Weather.

Lauren Saunders (2023) Evaporation Drawing #2 [Charcoal and Rust on paper].

Supporting Growth

Nurturing life by ethically creating (or contributing to) conditions for life to thrive. Making nourishing offerings.

Lauren Saunders (2022-23) Orb #5 (Erin) #2 [Earth, coir, clay and seeds].

Sustainable processing

Using sustainably gathered natural material to craft or make with (e.g. pigments, heritage crafts)

Making ink from elderberries

 Space-time interactions (Jokela 2008)

Walking. Hunting. Fishing. Foraging. (literally not condoning the killing of animals here by the way, I’m vegetarian, but more that hunting/fishing is a very traditional space-time interaction within indigenous communities).

Lauren Saunders. #foraging365 (2022-23) [Digital Film and accompanying map]

Essence Recognition

Drawing attention to a core quality or ‘essence’ of a collaborator – for example, tree rubbings or other phenomenological showcasing. Also Actor Network Theory (Bruno Latour 1996), which is the understanding that materials (a.k.a. ‘actors’) impact knowledge production.

Lauren Saunders. Medicine bath (2022) [Digital photograph of dried flowers and herbs]

Dialogue

Direct play, call and response, discussion, and relationship-building

Lauren Saunders and Merlin. Choreodography (2023) [Digital Film]

Interference patterning (Jevbratt 2009)

Shared moments and/or a conscious immersion with place and/or another Being.

Lauren Saunders. A conscious moment shared in a beautiful place (2023) [Digital Photography]

Response

Protocols (Jevbratt 2009), observation and documenting movement / sound / behaviours.

Lauren Saunders. Breydon Waters (2023) [Digital Film]

Psychical

Limbic resonance / Empathy (Jevbratt 2009), interspecies communication (Barrett et al 2021), intuition, meditation, symbolism, and ritual.

Lauren Saunders. Ritual Mat (2023) [Mixed Media installation]

Human Perspectives, Contradictions, and Challenges

The difficulty with creating the kind of absolutist maxims that I seem to be articulating here is they just don’t work in a practical sense – things are never that simple and like most ethical debates, there is no straightforward answer. There may be an element of overthinking here on my part and I feel every point deserves it’s own philosophical deep-dive… but I think the philosophical difficulties it presents are worth chewing over even in brief.

At the centre of a lot of complications is the fact that we are limited by human bias. For example, scientists are currently researching more-than-human consciousness and sensitivity, but they are limited by the fact that there may be measurable signals that modern science hasn’t yet discovered yet, let alone developed appropriate tools. We are essentially working with a lot of assumptions based on the information we have available to us.

When we apply this to defining ethical collaborative methodologies, we’re only able to assume what is fair and equitable (or harmful and disempowering) using human parameters based on existing human sensibilities, tools, and ethics. It also seems easier to recognise what harm is in some more-than-human entities than others – such as animals – due to shared physiologies. But our concern often stops there, rarely extending to plants or minerals without bringing other consequences into the equation (e.g. how a harmed tree negatively impacts the ecosystem). 

Essentially, I’m asking the question of how can we be sure that we’re not harming the ‘soul’ (take that either literally or figuratively) of a dandelion when we collect its petals to make an ink? 

And speaking of processing ‘material’… at what point does it lose it’s essence of Being? Take a tree for example. Although some will argue with me that trees are not sentient (fight me!), we can surely all agree that a tree is a living Being. At what point does it’s ‘voice’ get silenced in the process of processing the wood into paper? When it gets chopped down? When it’s pulped? Or does it retain tree-ness even once it is processed into paper? Or was there never an essential essence of tree-ness, just a process of change and transformation?

Do the trace elements of earth metals in your laptop or phone still have a voice? Are they any less alive than when they were in the ground? What about the sausages in your freezer? What assumptions are we making when we attribute alive-ness to one type of more-than-human than another? What are we basing those assumptions on? Do we equate ‘voice’ with alive-ness, and is that the right approach to take? What does it mean if it is… and if it isn’t?

Here’s another excellent reflection from Jill, who says, “This makes me think that its important to argue for the identity and beingness and difference of plants, trees, animals, rocks… fish…. whilst at the same time wondering whether these separate identities exist. Whether that form of categorising and perception is just a human construct? If I’m made up of carbon atoms that were once stars/ trees/rocks (and may be again) does that make me human/animal/mineral – am I me, am I you? (Not sure of the science here!). I completely agree that we are confined by our experience and socialisation and species viewpoint. But that its really important to be curious beyond those parameters. To try! (which you argue for)”

I’ve been thinking a lot about fuzzy edges between self and (non-human) other, in fact having about three different conversations with different people this week about it. And where does human perception begin, and end – if it even does at all. I’m very remiss to accept the Western, categorical worldview that humans are separate entities to everything else, because, much like in the way Jill describes… it just doesn’t make any sense. This also reminds me of a quandry posed by philosopher John Locke, who asked if you’d still be you if your brain was transplanted into someone elses body. He concludes that a personal identity remains constant so long as there’s a shared history residing inside the mind. He argued for psychological continuity (there’s lots of critiques about this that I’ll save for another day!) … but what if he concluded things prematurely? Say we agree that ‘Self’ is in the mind… but the mind is contained by brain matter, atoms and molecules that would have had a shared history with the stars, trees and rocks… right? We’re just using the material now at this moment in time, but we have a shared history with literally everything else – at least in a material sense. Whether we believe in a dualist or materialist worldview, I think there’s many more fuzzy edges between humans and the more-than-human world than the Western perspective can comfortably dream of.

This is all really interesting through our Land-based lens of perception and concsiousness… where is self? Where is consciousness? How might fuzzy edges work?

In my paper The Geopoetics of Drawing, I wrote a chapter around what perception originates in the context of the Land. Some of my favourite philosophies include; a panexperientialist ‘philosophy of organism’, in which perception is shared by both object (e.g. a plant) and viewer (Whitehead 1929, cited by Sjöstedt-H, 2016); consciousness-enactment –  in which subjects (e.g. the landscape) gives the reader psychic ‘access’ – as opposed to consciousness-attribution, which is simply ascribing consciousness to something  (Caracciolo 2014, cited in Ryan, 2020, p.112); and the Navajo belief that perception is a participatory wind as opposed to a personal possession, which results in mystical/shamanic power (Abrams 1997).

There is also a history of human manipulation of the natural world. We have established that manipulation is an unethical behaviour when trying to cocreate HNHCCs. But what to do when your collaborations rely on that heritage of coercion?

I have a lovely border collie called Merlin and I’m unashamedly obsessed with him because he’s amazing and I’ll fight anyone who thinks otherwise. Needless to say, I have invited him to collaborate on some artworks with me and as such, he is essentially now my Collaborator-in-Cheif. Yet it dawned on me that to make work, which for him usually involves boisterous play, cuddles and snacks, I am fundamentally exploiting his now ‘natural’ behaviours that were bred into his species long, long ago by those interested in using him as a tool for protection and later, herding. Is it fair of me to exploit this? But then again… didn’t wolves/dogs also benefit from the arrangement of entering domestic environments and offering protection and their skills in exchange for food, shelter, health, and security? Is this ancestral relationship therefore actually one of reciprocal collaboration? Yet… we bred ‘desirable’ traits into wolves to the point where there exist breeds today that can’t breathe or walk without pain because of our notions of what’s cute or not. Merlin is relentlessly high-energy and slightly neurotic because he was bred to obsessively run to the point of literal collapse – that’s not really a ‘desired’ trait rooted in love, is it? 

How can anyone not be obsessed with that smile?

But I love Merlin, deeply. And I know he knows it. And I can only assume (!) he wants for nothing because he’s spoilt and a cherished member of our family. He seems to exhibit joy when we’re playing by way of a waggy tail, playful body language, and coming back for more – all exhibited behaviours which dogs seem to have learnt as a way to communicate with us (Salomons et al. 2021). Play / art-making seems to deepen our bond and connect us to one another. So does that mean that even though our interaction is rooted in historical manipulation and coercion from my species towards his, our playful interactions in the here and now are consensual and ethical? Art-making can also be described as a human behaviour… so is it unethical to coerce him – however lovingly and on his terms – to make art in collaboration with me when I can’t expect him to fully understand the human context of art?

It’s clear that sometimes creative collaborative actions may seem ethical in one way, but not another. What takes priority – philosophical principle or well-intentioned practical application? Where’s the line in between the two, and is it different in every circumstance? Let’s accept that our internal moral compasses define where the ethical boundaries are… but my moral compass is different than yours. What feels unethical to me could be morally acceptable to you, and vice versa. There is no universal calibration for ethics (which is what makes the subject so juicy, I suppose). Is leaving mono-crop carrots out as an offering to local deer an ethical action? On one-hand, you’re providing a tasty nutritious meal and may be the most substantial, easy-access thing it’s eaten in days… on the other you’re feeding it something that’s probably saturated with pesticides that was probably in soil stripped of life due to over-farming and probably travelled hundreds of miles to get into your hand.

And assuming it doesn’t understand the human context (it may well do after centuries of observing us), is hugging a tree out of love, and imposing that human behaviour, wrong?

Semi-candid snap of me and my fellow tree-huggers from Hull Friends of the Earth lol

An obvious example that comes to mind is the socio-political artwork Wheatfield – A Confrontation (Denes 1982). Denes planted and harvested 2 acres of wheat on the site of a Manhatten landfill, a site worth $4.5 billion. Although I acknowledge that the more-than-human voice wasn’t the point to this work, it offers a good example – especially as I originally presented it as an ethical collaboration in my journal article of 2022. It is an ethical collaboration with the more-than-human in the sense of the phenomenological showcasing of the natural ontology of wheat. It both nourishes life through plant growth where there wasn’t any before in Manhattan, and brings attention to the core qualities of wheat without trying to alter them. However, it is a monoculture crop, planted in a way that isolates it from the biodiversity that supports life to thrive. The wheatfield was also used as symbol and spectacle to make a point about (human) hunger and commerce and mismanagement – it’s value was reduced to resource. The harvested grain then travelled (presumable by plane) to 28 cities around the world as an exhibition (AgnesDenesStudio n.d). What was it’s carbon footprint I wonder? 

Denes, A. (1982) Wheatfield – A Confrontation. [Wheat].

There’s a great series on Netflix called ‘The Good Place’, in which there’s an ethics professor called Chidi who agonises over what to do in every circumstance which requires an ethical decision. I feel a lot like him when I’m trying to work out what I need to do. I really am dissecting nitty bitty philosophical conundrums here, albeit not with the robust philosophical analysis that Chidi would give it.

But Chidi is always paralysed with inaction because he recognises he can’t do right for wrong. He also recognises that not doing anything can also cause harm and eventually learns his agonising causes suffering for both himself and those around him. On this, my editor Jill commented “Buddhists talk about not overthinking with your brain – at the level of the mind – but to entrust decisions to a deeper part of our consciousness. To consider a question or dilemma as a seed that we plant in the soil of our mind, allow to take root, and the solution will rise up on its own in its own time!”

Lovely Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place. The Good Place, (2016-2020). NBC.

To avoid being a Chidi and causing you, dear reader, more suffering, I don’t believe there are absolutist maxims we can pull out of these discussions. Nor do I think it’s healthy or realistic to do so as it would lead to complete inaction. It’s also way too easy to forget to apply things in practice – at least that’s my experience. I’ll never cause outright harm but there are times when I genuinely forget to ask permission of a collaborator, faff more than I should, try to encourage certain types of behaviour or feel disappointed when a collaboration doesn’t turn out like I hoped. 

It’s also impossible to be fully ethical in the world we live in, because someone or something is suffering down the line. SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH TO AVOID A ‘THE GOOD PLACE’ SPOILER. Chidi and his mates eventually work out that the ‘points system’ that determines whether they go to The Good Place (“heaven”) or The Bad Place (“hell”) is fundamentally flawed, as no-one on Earth has got into The Good Place in 521 years. This is essentially because the world got too complicated. The example they use is giving someone a rose; a kind, thoughtful act. Five hundred years ago you’d snip a rose and gave it to someone and you’d get +15 points. But these days you’d buy a rose online… so you’ve supported Amazon and therefore contributed to poor workers’ rights and put a local florist out of business, you’ve added to pollution because of the delivery, plus there’s all the pesticides and preservatives it needs to grow and stay alive in transit… and now you’ve ended up getting -100 points because of all the unintended consequences of that one action.

I think this is similar to our ethics dilemma. Our world is so interconnected and exploitative of both people and planet for profit that – aside from the downright obvious acts of harm and abuse – we can’t always identify the most positive ethical outcome. Jill shares some wisdom on this: “We can never know the consequences of our actions in the future – but we can watch our intentions in the present. Buddhists would say that positive thoughts and actions lead to good karma and likewise with negative thoughts and actions. Individuals, groups, places, and species all have karma – which we can think of as consequences or seeds about to grow and ripen”.

We are human and certainly fallible. And in my case – forgetful. But I still maintain that by trying to consciously work with ethical, equitable practices where we do take some time to ponder the best ethical outcome, it helps strengthen and shape the internal moral compasses that inform our actions.

Having confronted the seeming impossibility of ethical action and decision making in our complex and interconnected times, I arrived at a place of intention. A determination to try to do the best thing, and I realised that a large part of this involves attempting to see, hear, and know outside my species perspective.

Knowing

Much of these practices require an ability to actually ‘hear’ more-than-human voices – which as I’m discovering is a skill that needs practice but does get easier with time. I use the word ‘hear’ to respond to my preferred use of ‘voice’, but hearing does not just involve auricular senses. This echoes what I said before about fuzzy edges and perception, because it involves all manner of knowing.

During my BA (Hons) Fine Art, I did a whole creative-philosophical investigation into epistemological knowing… and drew raisins for 18 months in an attempt to really get to know them. In the end, I proposed nine ways of knowing about a ‘thing’:

1. Mental imagery
2. Memories andassociations
3. Recollection of knowledge / data
4. Visual Observation (sight)
5. Somatosensation (touch, pressure, feel)
6. Listening (sound)
7. Olfacation (smell)
8. Taste
9. Judgement

And yes, I am aware that there may be barriers for some people in experiencing all of these things. All are not necessary to know something, because our ability to perceive and know is limited by the instruments that any one of us has available.

Lauren Saunders. Paper Raisin (2018) [paper]

Yes, we can indeed use these processes to get to know and ‘hear’ a more-than-human collaborator, but I now realise that I missed one important ‘knowing’ experience off: intuition. You might prefer different names – psychicism, your gut feeling, spirituality, cunning – but it essentially refers to that part of you that just ‘knows’ something without necessarily understanding how.

We’re not here to argue if ‘intuition’ is a result of subconscious but empirical micro-observations, psychological projection, or transcendental experience, but to recognise that – whatever it is – it is a form of knowing and ought to be taken seriously. 

For example, last Spring I was just chilling with my cat Osiris in my studio. We were both just doing our own thing – I was in the flow of making and for him that meant he was sprawled out in a sunbeam, sleeping on the carpet. Then from nowhere, I felt like something was wrong with him and so I turned to look. Nothing there to report. He looked the same as always but I noted a weird sensation in my fingers. I got down on the floor to stroke him – and noticed that one of his front toes was a bit swollen and his claw was going in the wrong direction – he had a broken toe. 

I love this sassy old man so much.

How did I know something was wrong? What prompted me to check him out? He wasn’t walking any different, he wasn’t yowling in pain – in fact, he didn’t seem too bothered except for angrily pulling his paw away from me. But by listening to my gut (and weird feeling fingers?) I learnt something new about his experience. 

Another time, I went to go collaborate with a tree in a local greenspace. I told the tree out loud what I wanted to do (mentally trying to ‘throw’ my intention towards the trunk too) – which was to do some drawing by using string to attach a pen onto one of its branches – and asked if it would collaborate with me. I got a sense of wariness but an agreement to continue. So I laid the paper down under the branch, set up my string and pen (with much faffing in terms of height) and invited the tree – and the wind – to draw. It was clear the pen was too heavy so I replaced it with a stick of charcoal. 

And then the tree told me off. I got such an overwhelming sense of being insensitive before I understood why; I was asking a tree to draw with something that was once part of a tree… before it was burnt to a crisp. Would that be like asking a person to draw using the charcoaled corpse of a distant cousin or something? Whether this sense of guilt came from the tree or my own head, I don’t think it really matters. What matters, much like my experience with Osiris, is that it led to a more nuanced understanding of the potential or actual sensitivities of those we want to collaborate with and how by being receptive to what’s emerging we can develop new learning that informs our interactions with our more-than-human brethren.

There’s another semi-related observation as well. I did this 12 month photography project called #foraging365, shown above, in which I took a smartphone photograph of the ‘loudest’ non-human entity everyday for a year and posted it to Instagram. At first, my intention was to actually forage and collect the objects I took photographs of. On Day 3, I found myself looking at my three collected objects and decided it was actually pretty shitty of me to take these for my own collection. It felt really colonial? Like, I had decided I had a right to displace these plants and stones and put them into a box in my studio? What the fuck? I found myself reflecting on my apparent perceived ‘right’ to take things and didn’t like it, so things were left where I found them. I think it was then about a month or two in when I started questioning my habit of physically plucking a flower or leaf from it’s stem for a photo, before leaving it to fall to the ground to mulch down. I realised I was potentially harming and undermining the plant (I imagine it’s really energy intensive to grow flowers) whilst denying insects from having a meal. What the fuck? Who was I to keep doing this for literally no purpose but to take an (human) aesthetic photo? So the following day I started showing more respect by acknowledging these Beings’ priorities and took photos of flowers/leaves etc whilst they were still attached to their plant. My point is… it’s important to notice and respond to the moments when you feel your internal moral compass shift and take accountability for your mistakes by interacting with your more-than-human collaborators better next time.

This relates to two theories that I’ve been thinking about and exploring a lot. Firstly, one that I’ve coined the Curly Wurly theory. I won’t go into depth too much as I’ve written about this elsewhere… but much like a Cadbury’s Curly Wurly a healthy, rich artistic research practice has three interweaving strands. One part making, one part theory, and one part receptiveness. By receptiveness I mean the ability to hear the emergent experiences that the ‘universe’ is providing you – through chance, intuition, your values and needs, the intangible, conversation, serendipity, whatever – and recognising the potential that has to influence, deepen or re-situate your creative practice.

The other theory – which I didn’t make up – is called Riverspeaking.

Riverspeaking

To plagiarise myself again (Saunders 2022):

“…the land itself can be considered both an ontological knowledge:memory keeper and a responsive ethical, teacher (Prechtel, 2012, cited in Lange, 2017). Riverspeaking – the process of engaging with this knowing-land – is understood as ‘flowing between process thinking and analytical thinking, living closer to phenomena, becoming conscious of the voices of kin, and actively engaging with cosmic responsibility’ (ibid., p.40). We are all indigenous to somewhere and thus carry its ancient knowledge in our cells, which we can relearn through restorative learning processes (e.g. intuitive attunement, ancient practice, stories, ritual and ceremony)…. Regained knowledge acts as a foundation for contemporary cosmic moral and ethical sensibilities that have been buried under Western ontologies and social pressures (ibid).”

In simpler words, Riverspeaking acknowledges that there is both knowledge inherent in the Land, and – despite Western anti-nature conditioning – an inherent human ability to be able to hear the Land. By engaging with ‘restorative learning practices’ – cultural, agricultural, and ritual activities – we can tune back into the frequencies of the Land and learn lessons in sustainability. What’s interesting is that before I learnt there was a term that articulated this properly, I called it ‘Earthwalking’. Or maybe they’re different… in which Earthwalking leads to Riverspeaking?

Lauren Saunders. Mini Summer Harvest (2021) [Digital Photography]

I’ve been exploring practices that feel like restorative learning. In the last year I have been actively engaged with Lunar Planting, Permaculture Gardening, traditional crafts using natural material (such as whittling, weaving, paper-making), fire-building, herbalism, bird-watching, experimental eco-drawing, nature-based meditations, play (with animals), folk celebration (Mabon and Wassail were highlights this year), and intuition-building activities such as tarot and automatic writing. I have also read up a lot on British and Irish folk-history for clues of how we might have listened to the Land before the cataclysmic nature-disconnection brought about by the Industrial Revolution. And magic. I’ve read a lot of magic books.

Photograph of my being the Orchard Light at 2024’s Wassail ceremony at Pickering Park Community Orchard. Photo credit: Faith Foster.

Have I learnt lessons in sustainability? Yes, actually, I think I have. I’m becoming ever more aware of the needs and behaviours of different members of the more-than-human community. Part of that comes from spending time alongside Beings, another part comes from having direct material and spiritual experience with those who hold a different form of knowledge than myself. It’s also been a lot easier to put myself in the ‘shoes’ of the Landscape, be able to sympathise with their experience – obviously only as far as I can as a human being – and identify patterns and simple solutions that would help meet their needs (which, funnily enough, tend to be sustainable options!). I’ve also been able to more easily recognise human disconnection BUT also ways to more effectively re-connect. And I’ve become more balanced mentally – which is a massive deal as I’m someone with complex/long-term madness stemming from childhood. I imagine this balance comes from both an increased social and ecological cohesion, and the fact I’m now more spiritually nourished with a greater clarity of purpose. As I type, it’s only now that I recognise what a huge shift there’s actually been for me in the last year or two. I’ve learnt lessons from the Land that’s made me feel a shit tonne more wise and resilient in every single way.

I delivered a six week project in summer – imaginatively called Riverspeaking – working alongside students from the NHS Humber Recovery College – to explore ideas around water kinship in Hull. Hull has a difficult maritime heritage; it was a hub of industrial trade, fishing, and whaling and many lives were lost at sea. Loosely structured and responsive to participant ideas and needs, together we explored what a more compassionate maritime heritage of the future would look like in Hull. 

Photograph from the Riverspeaking Project. Image credit: Neil Holmes / Hull Maritime

We spent time with various bodies of water within the city and responded creatively to its behaviour, its lack of rights, pollution, the language we use to talk about water, and ways in which Hull citizens could connect to the water to develop a caring relationship with it. We may not have engaged in ‘restorative learning practices’ per se, but there was absolutely was a  ‘flowing between process thinking and analytical thinking, living closer to phenomena, becoming conscious of the voices of kin, and actively engaging with cosmic responsibility’. Participants commented on how it helped them care more about the ‘wellbeing’ of the Water for its own sake. They said how the Riverspeaking course should be made mandatory for all Hull residents, as it would help everyone to care more about the Water and think of it as less of a resource, and more a member of our community, who we need to learn to negotiate with rather than ‘manage’. What a thing to say after only six sessions! There really is something in taking the time to (re)learn how to (re)listen to our more-than-human kin… and I’m totally here for it.

I would be really interested to know – if this was rolled out to all Hull citizens (who would all be as equally openminded as me and the Riverspeaking participants) – how it might impact things like policy making, sustainability and climate resilience planning, housing development, domestic growing practices, green space management and so on. Could it help shift thinking from ‘natural resource’ to ‘members of our community’?

Next?

Honestly, all I really want to do is platform more-than-human voices and share these creative kinship-developing processes with people. I have a few ideas for community-based participatory projects that I think will be absolutely beautiful and meaningful. And some other partnered projects on broader themes of human:non-human collaboration and ecological kinship. But alas! It’s all funding pending! It’s super frustrating to have a shopping list of ideas which I know would be brilliant but having no cash with which to do anything! And there’s other projects that I’ve been invited onto… but as it stands there’s nothing fixed in stone there either until more conversations – and money – happen. There’s a tangential essay here about the difficulties of precocity in the arts industry… but I will save that for another day.

But it is worth nothing the difficulty of doing the kind of work that challenges hegemony and orthodoxy whilst relying on funding bodies who – even if they are wanting to try to new things – need to operate in a reductionist and anthopocentrical system that promotes the values and beliefs I diametrically oppose.

I hate to say it but I need a wealthy philanthropist who shares my vision and is willing to bankroll my projects!

I am, however, now part of Feral Art School’s Rewilding Practice programme, which is about working with industry to explore sustainable practice. As someone who has only ever really worked within community spheres, I think it will be interesting to see if / where / how my thinking could be applied in industrial settings. I wrote a blog about my starting points… which true to form, is philosophically dense.

As a related aside, I was running a workshop in Knarsborough the other week and one of the participants said that I’m an ‘interesting philosopher’ <3 What a compliment!

Conclusion

I began writing thinking that I would consolidate my thinking and what I’ve been doing and a plan of what I should be doing next would emerge. But the truth is… I actually think I need to continue with what I’m doing. I’ve found an area within climate activism that is both potentially high-impact and complements my unique set of skills. I think I need to just keep seizing opportunities to put all this theory into practice – whether on my own or with communities – and make change (however small). Having knowledge and skill are wonderful gifts, but if it’s not used for the benefit of others… what’s the point? 

Saying that, I would like to pursue a practice-based PhD on these themes in the coming years. Again, need cash though! I really miss the external structure of the MA (e.g. set days to come in, methodical module development, deadlines) because I really struggle with the arbitrary time scales and processes I set myself. This is why I work so damn well to a brief and a deadline!

It’s been helpful to to articulate what is now essentially old ground for me as I find reminders help make sense of internal creative chaos. I have discovered that yeah, actually, I do have a really cohesive and well-considered understanding of things – and that’s important to remember as it doesn’t always feel like that. It more-often-than-not feels like grasping in the dark – but that’s part of intuitive and responsive working I suppose, isn’t it?

But having said that, these ethical and philosophical questions are never far from my mind. I’m always thinking – and feeling – about what the best course of action is materially and ethically. Which, admittedly, can prevent me from doing anything (‘doing a Chidi’). But that Riverspeaking phrase of ‘flowing between process thinking and analytical thinking’ underlines pretty much everything I do.

Jill commented on my non-linerarity and the uncertainty of not knowing. I write about this is the Curly-Wurly article, but I feel it’s a much more holistic and human way of working. The Scientific Revolution of the Enlightenment – for all its beneficial advancements – had a tendency to identify, disconnect, extract, reduce and distill everything into a state of isolation and hard efficiency. A specimen behind glass, an active ingredient stripped from its source, a monoculture crop. This is not how we see life thrive in nature. Rather, a thriving ecosystem is messy, interconnected and holistic, and full of threads of influence that we will never fully understand or predict with our science. So to work in a more Gestalt way feels like the right way to do things, especially given the subject matter. Moving away from the dominant scientific perspective (as much as I can obviously, I’m still a product of and subject to early-21st century Britain) and towards a holistic worldview allows me to share in the perspective of the Land, better ‘hear’ it and understand the interconnectedness of all things.

I had some good conversations last week with my fellow ReWilders about how I perhaps need to work on the ‘storytelling’ of what I’m doing. All this flowing and philosophical chewiness and ‘hearing’ the Land can be a bit inaccessible to a lot of people. Inaccessibility is useless to me because I don’t want to ‘lose’ people because I hadn’t told a straightforward enough tale. Part of the difficulty for me is that very little of it is linear … but people love a linear story. It feels important for me to address this, because there’s been so many benefits from learning to listen to our more-than-human communities and I believe that there’s wider benefit to be had if people join me in this way of thinking. On a personal level – the balance, the resilience, the connection. On an ecological level – the respect, the care, the kinship. On a world-changing level – stewardship, compassion and existential survival. And what we as a collective species decide to do at this critical moment in time? Well, that’s the most important story, isn’t it?

References