Listening to plants

Summary: This research investigates connections between sensory alteration, pleasure, resistance and healing through a land-focused art practice in collaboration with organic materials. Through multisensory installations, murals, sculptures, and texts, my work engages with the audience, recontextualizing notions of healing, embodiment, and land. This art practice is influenced by new materiality, phenomenology, spirituality, and science. The practice is further informed by contemporary artists who work with herbology and healing. With this thesis, I aim to explain why working with plants matters. I investigate ways for art to become medicine. I reflect on how I can ethically engage with the land as a settler. I explore how this work is intended to be viewed. Embodiment and inter-species collaboration inform my practice, and I explain how this research shapes my art today. The objective of this work is to encourage space for healing to become a social or communal practice engaged in a conversation around artmaking. By contributing to a community in this way, I ask viewers to consider what creative healing could mean for them, and how they might imagine this practice themselves.