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 will unfold in two contexts:

Within my therapeutic practice in Melbourne, I will 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.

Later this year, the inquiry will also be carried into a residency at La Sierra Artist Residency in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. The Sierra Nevada is considered the Heart of the World — a sacred ecological territory that rises from the Caribbean Sea to snow-capped peaks, holding one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. It is home to the Arhuaco, Kogui, Wiwa, and Kankuamo peoples, who have cared for this land for thousands of years and continue to hold ancestral knowledge about reciprocity, balance, and the interconnection of all life.

The residency offers a space where art and nature enter into dialogue — shaped by the biodiversity and ancestral wisdom of the region. My time there will support deeper engagement with the questions at the heart of this inquiry: how do we listen to land? What does it mean to make art in relationship with place, rather than about it?

I will also participate in the Jaguar Jungle Impact Lab, a five-day immersive experience facilitated by Jaguar Siembra in the same region. The Lab is guided by indigenous elders and is oriented toward regenerative thinking, creative expression, and ancestral technologies for ecological care. It offers a space to cross thresholds — between cultures, between disciplines, between knowing and unknowing — in service of a more relational and sustainable future.

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 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 the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and with indigenous knowledge, I hold awareness that this land is not mine, and that the wisdom held by its peoples is not something to acquire. I approach this context as a guest — with humility, reciprocity, and a commitment to listening.

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