Current Research

Sensing the Refuge: art-based approaches to multispecies temporalitie and naturecultural relations in Britain’s rainforests is a project of doctoral research through art practice.

I am interested in finding ways to experience, articulate and share ideas about more-than-human time and how animal, plant and human temporal patterns and timescales are navigated and negotiated between species in these forests. This way of working necessitates a variety of approaches — interdisciplinary practice, return visits, learning from experts such as ecologists, foresters, conservationists, lichen biologists — and an art practice that utilises diverse methods for engaging with ideas of place and time, such as sound recording, field notes, camera-less photography, film making, drawing and sculpture.

During these early stages of research, I have many questions guiding my fieldwork plans and practice

As people interact with these woodlands, they come into contact with many kinds of rhythms and patterns of time -- migratory patterns of birds, seasonal processes of first leafing, fruiting, shedding and the long maturation timescales of trees. I'm interested in how these temporal rhythms are experienced through different senses and in how more-than-human time is embodied by people caring for these forests - how do they attune to animal and plant rhythms through their bodies: through sight, smell, touch or intuition? I want to find ways that art practices can help me to experienced the multiple and multi-natured expressions of time in these forests and how art is able to communicate something of this to community audiences. I'm interested in how creative fieldwork both mirrors and diverges from ecological or geographical fieldwork. How can interdisciplinary approaches to fieldwork complement each other when artist and ecologist work together to consider multispecies time in place?

Scotland's rainforests are defined by the presence of key indicator species such as tree lungwort, and are crucial for the survival of rare lichen and bryophyte species. As forest fragments are reconnected and trees planted that will become the scaffolding for future lichens, future rainforests are planned. Trees and lichens are slow-growing in relative to human lifetimes. How are such long timescales navigated by humans working to regenerate or protect certain rainforest species in the context of uncertain environmental futures? What art practices can consider this negotiation between future forests and the labour and care that is undertaken now.

I'm interested in ethical questions that arise from object-based conservation interventions, such as wildlife boxes, lichen translocation materials, tree guards, nest installations and herbivore fencing, and how these conservation practices embody cross-species collaboration across diverging timescales. I hope to find out how art methods can consider the materiality of conservation materials, structures and artificial habitats, and examine how these human-made objects function as expressions of care between species and collaborations for survival across varying scales of time -- of human, bird, lichen and tree.