Cultivating Connivance with Landscape: Deepening Care Through an Immersive Creative Art Residency in Porongurup – The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools

This paper addresses the guiding principle of care, as a sustainable practice, through my visual arts doctoral research. Framed through practice–led research methodology, this sensorial project details my immersive interaction with nature, focusing on integrating slow practice and relational care into arts practice. The environment as a complex site of varying entanglements (Haraway, 2016) is central to this study and specifically discusses a residency undertaken in the biodiverse region of the Porongurup Range, (Borongor–up)—the traditional lands of the Minang Peoples in Western Australia. The writing unfolds through encounters, responses, and improvisations in situated contexts (Ingold 2021), guided by intuitive non–intentional practices (Tsing, 2015), such as slow walking, meandering, extended periods of stillness, and noticing. An overview of the broader research enquiry contextualises care in developing reciprocal understanding enacted in embodied practices of micro level intimate natural–world, and sensorial material encounters. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism informs the research through the writings of Nikos Papastergiadis (2023), in which sensory responsiveness to place enables shifts in perspective from the immediate material world to more relational imaginaries. This paper unfolds through a bricolage informed by an experiential approach that adopts methods that move away from consumptive practices toward processual relational attunement.

About the author

Amanda Allerding is a Western Australian artist and PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University Perth. Her current practice–led research explores culture–nature entanglements through slow, embodied methods, including printmaking, dyeing, and process–based installation. Engaging with landscapes in Western Australia and classical gardens of Jiangsu, China, she investigates relational encounters between self, place, and material. Her work draws on the cosmopolitan imaginary to examine how artistic practice can respond to ecological and philosophical concerns, and more–than–human ecologies.

Artist Nicola Kaye works with interactive digital video and projection within cultural institutions and is currently constructing speculative stories of everyday events contained within state archives, reimagining stories that remain peripheral or hidden. Nicola is a lecturer in visual arts at Edith Cowan University, Boorloo. Nicola has had numerous residencies—such as the State Library of Western Australia, and the WA Parliament, and Research Associate at the Maritime History Museum, WA, and has exhibited nationally, in China and the UK.

Clive Barstow is Emeritus Professor of art at Edith Cowan University, Honorary Professor of Art at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology China and Honorary Professor of Design and Guangdong University China. Clive is a practicing artist and writer with over fifty years of publications and exhibitions in Australia, Europe, Asia and America. His creative research focuses on the re-imagining of histories beyond linear time and geographic borders, and their relationships to the construction of social and religious space.