Practising Care: Approaching Landscapes in Art Practices

A reflection on artistic practice, attention, and more-than-human responsibility.

Working along the Thames Estuary in Kent, I allow the landscape to co-create the artwork, shaping form, rhythm, and material through its own temporal logic.

Working with a landscape, rather than simply depicting it, requires a shift in posture. It involves slowing down, listening differently, and entering into a relationship that is not extractive but dialogical. In recent years, my art practice has moved increasingly toward this form of engagement —rooted not in representation, but in situated care.

This approach is not neutral. It challenges the artist to consider presence, permission, and reciprocity. Inspired by feminist and posthumanist theory, I’ve come to think of landscape not as a scene, but as a living, entangled field of relations. This shift has redefined how I create, and what it means to “work” with a place.

From Extraction to Reciprocity

In earlier phases of my practice, I often collected pigments and natural materials from various locations. While I took care to use them respectfully, I hadn’t yet fully asked:

1. What does this place need from me, beyond my attention or aesthetic interest?

2. Who else is being affected by my presence, even if I tread lightly?

3. Am I entering this landscape as an observer, a taker, or a guest?

4. What histories, human and more-than-human, are embedded in this site, and am I willing to listen to them?

5. Is this material offering itself, or am I assuming it’s mine to use?

6. How can I attune to the temporality of this landscape rather than impose my own timeline of making?

7. What kinds of knowledge or experience are not accessible to me here, and how do I respect that unknowability?

8. Am I prepared to leave with nothing but the encounter itself?

It was through more sustained, site-responsive work, especially along the Thames Estuary, that I began to develop a practice of care-based engagement.

At the Thames, I started by simply walking the shifting edge between land and water. I collected not just materials—clay, silt, salt, chalk—but also rhythms: the tide’s breathing, the silence between waves, the residue of human presence. The Thames has been my collaborator.

Care as Situated and Relational

Philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa describes care as “a matter of response-ability,” emphasising that care is always situated, and never abstract or universal (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In this sense, working with a landscape becomes less about technique or aesthetic and more about developing an ethic of attention.

This attention includes:

• Noticing temporalities: the tide, the erosion, the seasonal sediment shifts.

• Respecting fragility: not disturbing certain areas, working with what is already offered.

• Acknowledging entanglement: recognising the human and nonhuman histories that shape the site.

  
  

When I developed Intertidal Resonances, a project emerging from my time along the Thames, care manifested in many ways. I worked with sediment collected only from the surface, never digging. I used sound recording not to capture but to attune. I left some materials to decay, allowing weather to intervene. These were not aesthetic choices alone—they were gestures of de-centring control.

Beyond Human Time

As feminist theorist Donna Haraway reminds us, “we become-with” the world, not above or outside it (Haraway, 2016). To approach a landscape with care is to recognise that we are already implicated, already entangled.

This also means stepping outside the urgency and linearity of human time. Working with the Thames Estuary, I’ve found that meaning doesn’t arrive through quick observation or singular visits. Instead, I return to the same stretch of shoreline repeatedly—across months, seasons, even years. I witness how the land reshapes itself: where the tide advances and recedes, where silt gathers or disappears, how debris moves, how colour and sound shift. I document some of this with a camera or field notes, but much of the learning happens through embodied presence—walking the same paths, noticing subtle changes, experiencing weather, breath, and rhythm in relation to place. Over time, this repetitive return becomes a form of slow witnessing, where understanding is not extracted or imposed, but arises gradually through attunement, patience, and humility.

Slowness, Vulnerability, and the Refusal to Master

The notion of care in artistic practice also demands vulnerability. As Tsing (2015) argues, precarity is not something to avoid, but a condition we share with the landscapes we inhabit. Working with mud that cracks, tides that erase, and sound that escapes the microphone, I’ve learned to let go of the desire for permanence or control.

In many ways, I no longer think of landscape as “subject matter.” I think of it as host. And like any guest, I arrive with respect, with gifts, and without presumption.

Toward a Practice of Care

To work with a landscape is to risk being changed by it. My current practice is grounded in this understanding. It blends research, ecological awareness, sensory attention, and humility. It is guided not only by what I wish to say, but by what I am willing to hear.

Over time, my spiritual practice, rooted in yoga, connection with the seasons, cyclical observation of the moon, and Indian philosophical traditions, has shaped how I relate to landscape and material. These disciplines have taught me to slow down, to listen through the body, and to recognise time not only as linear, but as seasonal, tidal, and relational. This embodied attentiveness now informs both my artistic process and my understanding of care.

Care is not always visible in the final artwork.

But it is embedded in the process, layered into the way I walk, listen, choose, and respond.

It is, perhaps, the most important medium I work with.

References:

If you want to explore the thinkers I mentioned, I suggest these books:

1. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

2. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

3. Tsing, A.L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

4. Kimmerer, R.W., 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.