Sensing the More-Than-Human World: An Arts-Based Inquiry with Children and Nature

This inquiry explores how art-making supports children to sense the more-than-human world — through embodied, place-based, and non-verbal ways of knowing.

Rather than positioning nature as something to learn about, this work attends to how children already exist in relationship with the living world — how they sense, move, attend, and respond within ecological contexts. It foregrounds sensory perception, rhythm, and presence, making space for uneven, neurodivergent, and non-verbal forms of sensing that are often overlooked in conventional frameworks.

The inquiry sits within a broader orientation toward relational and ecological ways of understanding wellbeing. It is informed by perspectives that recognise human experience as part of — not separate from — the wider living world. The earth, the body, and the senses are understood not as backdrops to experience, but as participants in it.

This way of seeing has deep roots. Many indigenous knowledge systems understand the world as animate, relational, and responsive — a web of reciprocity between human and more-than-human life. In contemporary ecological thought, writers and thinkers have begun to recover these perspectives, attending to how sensory perception binds us into the land, and how our bodies are always already in conversation with wind, water, soil, and sound.

This inquiry does not seek to apply a method. It asks: what happens when we slow down enough to notice? What do children already know about belonging to the earth? What might art-making offer as a way of listening — not directing, extracting, or interpreting — but simply attending to what is already present in the relationship between child and place?

Where this inquiry lives

This inquiry unfolds within my therapeutic practice in Melbourne, where I continue exploring how art-making in natural and ecological settings supports children's sensing, expression, and connection. This includes attention to materials drawn from place — clay, water, found objects, plants, earth — and to the ways rhythm, movement, and stillness shape what becomes possible.

This inquiry also extends to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, through a residency with La Sierra Artist Residency in January 2027— an organisation whose work sits at the intersection of art, ancestral knowledge, and the living biodiversity of that territory.

This visit holds particular resonance for this inquiry. The Sierra Nevada is understood by its peoples — the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo — as the heart of the world: a territory where water is not a resource but a living presence, tended through generations of reciprocal relationship. Here, the questions this inquiry carries — about how we sense, attend, and belong — meet a context in which those questions have never been abstract.

During the residency, I will have the privilege of spending time alongside local guardian communities of water, Indigenous women of the Sierra, and children's organisations rooted in the region. I arrive not with a framework to apply, but with a quality of attention — to what the land holds, to what these communities already know, and to what art-making might offer as a mode of presence and exchange within that context.

What I am noticing

This is not a formal research project with predetermined outcomes. It is a personal and professional inquiry, held within my practice and my learning. I am interested in:

• how children sense the world when given time and space

• how art-making supports expression beyond language

• what emerges when natural materials are offered as companions rather than tools

• how place, texture, light, weather, and sound shape what becomes possible

• how neurodivergent and non-verbal ways of sensing can be honoured within ecological practice

Findings and reflections will be shared here over time — through images, writing, and creative artefacts — as the inquiry unfolds.

Ethical orientation

This inquiry is approached with care and respect. It involves no formal data collection and does not seek to measure, categorise, or extract from children's and indigenous experience. Any images or reflections shared will be done so with consent and in ways that honour the dignity of the children and families involved.

In engaging with different places, peoples, and knowledge traditions, I hold awareness that much of this wisdom is not mine to take. I approach each context as a guest — with humility, reciprocity, and a commitment to listening.

This commitment deepens in contexts where I am a guest within Indigenous and community life. In engaging with the Sierra Nevada and the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo peoples of that territory, I hold clearly that their knowledge systems — their relationships with water, land, seasons, and the living world — are not data, not source material, and not mine to carry home. These are living systems of thought and practice, held within communities who have protected them across generations, often in the face of significant pressure to relinquish them.

I do not arrive with Western frameworks to test, validate, or translate. I do not seek to document what I witness through the lens of my own practice or tradition. My presence is oriented toward encounter — not extraction. What I may bring back is a changed quality of attention: a way of looking that has been altered by proximity to different ways of knowing. That is distinct from taking knowledge that belongs elsewhere.

I am aware that the history of researchers, artists, and practitioners entering Indigenous communities with good intentions and leaving with something — a concept, a practice, a story — later repackaged and circulated within Western contexts is long and harmful. I hold this history as a live ethical concern, not a historical footnote. The measure of this visit will not be what I produce from it, but how I moved within it.

This inquiry is ongoing. It is not finished, and may never be. Like the questions it holds, it is allowed to stay open.