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.
Cultivating Connivance with Landscape: Deepening Care Through an Immersive Creative Art Residency in Porongurup
Amanda Allerding, PhD Candidate, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University; Dr Nicola Kaye, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University; Emeritus Professor Clive Barstow, School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University
2024 Conference