Daise Rowe reflects on the role art and design education can play in our relationship with nature.
I remember the first painting I made of planet earth. An A3, black covered, ring-bound sketchbook; page one, an illustration floating boldly in the page. It wasn’t an incredible piece, but it made me feel part of something bigger than myself and formed a groundwork for my practice today as an illustrator and teacher. How might art and design teachers grow a sense of earth-bound connection in young people?
As a student again, I have been digging around the ideas of Donna Haraway. In her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble, Haraway writes about the lively art of living on a damaged planet, to enact collectively as sympoietic entities – to realise we are working with one another and, whether we always feel it or not, we are involved, connected and enacting in the ongoing entanglement of the troubles we face in contemporary times. Troubles may include mass biodiversity loss; frequent detachments from other life due to an excessive push toward a hierarchical way of thinking and being; the lack of accessible, everyday conversation around the troubles playing out; and the lack of appropriate reading, comprehension and emotional literacy when trying to understand such catastrophic issues.
Haraway (2016) gives examples of science - art - activist worldings, committed to ‘partial healing and modest rehabilitation’ to grow robust response-ability for powerful and threatened places and beings. The Great Barrier Reef and all the world’s coral reefs become entwined with the Crochet Coral Reef project, instigated by twin sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim. Since the start of the project, over 8,000 people, mostly women, in 27 countries have come together to crochet in wool, plastic bags, used reel tape: their materials including just about anything discarded that can be induced to loop and whirl in the ‘codes of crocheting’ (Haraway, 2016). The movement of Crocheted Coral Reef actions sees knotting of marine biology, environmental activism, women’s handicrafts and community art practices. The act is interdisciplinary, open-ended and playful with a situated knowledge coming from the Wertheim twin’s location of Brisbane and studies of material and craft poetics. As each new crafter connects with the project, they respond with their own attachment to coral reef protection, not through practicing marine biology or taking extensive trips to critical zones but through an ‘intimacy without proximity’ and a material play that builds caring people. This example feels do-able in classrooms, many already adopting this method of making and activism.
What about the students in our art and design classes? How can we equip them with the tools needed to navigate all this complexity? The troubles we see today will not be solved overnight, systems of complicated interconnected relationships of agents – living and non-living – each having an effect on the next. The first step might be to realise this and process the grief of feeling powerless or managing the apathy that comes with this trouble.
Growing a response-ability (Haraway, 2016) will take time, patience and persistence. Over the course of this year, I have been planning the kinds of responses I want to teach and speak with. Rooting into the method of drawing and filmmaking, I have been working with plant and vegetable inks which can be made in a kitchen with an old pan and some onion skins or other plant material. The onion skins I have worked with are mainly food waste, maintaining a process of circularity in the method. Some of the plant material has come from community and shared gardens, one of which is in a school. Community gardens are fascinating places of collective action and togetherness, some fraught with their own inner politics, however the gardens I have reached out to so far have all commented on how thankful they have been for the space and to work with plants and the earth. I am interested in how community gardens can be sites for reattachment between people, plant, land and material.
It matters what ‘matter’ is used to talk about matters of the earth crisis. Most paints now come with a warning sign to say they are damaging to aquatic life. The materials we use to teach and make with will set the seeds to what relationships we might have, not only with the earth, but our local environment and beyond. Previously I have worked with concrete, brick and charcoal to create mediums with which to draw and talk about our relationship to these man-made materials. Just like the traces left from the creation of man-made materials – the extraction of lime or clay from the earth – plant material has another, very living connection. Connection and connectivity between material and meaning can form a bond in not only the maker, but the viewer or audience themselves, helping us reconsider or realise where materials come from and what it means to use them.
About the author
Daise Rowe works with illustration, moving image and materials in her creative and teaching practice. Interested in the relationships people have with nature, she is currently researching and working with community gardens in the UK to learn more about their methods of collective action. She is currently studying at the RCA Visual Communication course.
Image
Onion skin research by Daise Rowe.
Bibliography & recommended further reading
Haraway, D. J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central (Accessed: 6 April 2025).
Garber, E., Hochtritt, L., & Sharma, M. (eds) (2018), Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change. Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford. Available at: ProQuest Ebook Central (Accessed: 6 April 2025).