ART & PLANTS & A MINDSET FOR A POSITIVE FUTURE

I like plants as my muse - plants and their environments, and the medicine or message they imbue. They bring me an aliveness and into a relationship that goes beyond intuition or instinct, one that forms and transforms my art work. From the encounter, I am left changed by their character, and usually restored in some way. This is the work I bring to others too.

One of the greatest of wonders for me is to acknowledge the direct communication with nature around us. Sometimes, it’s the spirit of a place. Sometimes, it’s asking the river what is needed. Most often, it’s the plant forms and gestures and functions that become a huge source of information. This has informed my own art work and helped me design, create and facilitate a healthy practise of creativity, connection and self enquiry for others. I’ve found it also gives hope and motivation for shared impulses to create a positive future.

A little context for my work:

I first worked in global music PR and event and brand management. Then I was inspired by a trip to Mexico in 2004 where I witnessed immense beauty but learnt about an alarming loss in bio-diversity beginning to unfold. I was moved to do something more connected to a reverence for the natural world.

I changed my direction studying nature based awareness practises, and then art therapy. For the last 20 years I have focused on work and my own self development that draws on the necessity of our wellbeing in connection to the wellbeing of our environment. It has not been easy, more and more as technology increases and climate changes, we need to regulate our nervous systems as much as we need to have a healthy environmental system.

I have been profoundly touched and guided in my work and attitude by the Mexica tradition in Mexico. I entered into an apprenticeship with a traditional Curandera (healer) in 2004, and had the fortune to study over many years the in-depth nature-based philosophies to live well, heal well, learn and maintain balance. This has also grounded in me the importance of honouring and protecting the spiritual and cultural knowledge of people and cultures with ancestral practices still intact. Technology we all need.

I studied art therapy in 2008-11 making a decision to go to Tobias School of Art & Therapy, an Anthroposophical transpersonal counselling training. On some level this was a mistake because the course is not recognised by the HPC despite it’s integrity as a City & Guilds masters equivalent with extensive personal therapy and clinical practise undertaken. However, it was vastly richer for understanding art as a spiritual science and how nature, colour, form, story can affect one physically, neurologically and energetically.

These trainings were the foundation for specialising in botanical observation. I found it to be the most transformative theme when working therapeutically. Also the most interesting in terms of how art becomes the medium with which to replicate the life force in nature.

Over the years I have taught my own workshops, managed a school of art (The New School of Art) and worked as a therapeutic counsellor or facilitator, most regularly with neurodivergent children and adults. Often non-verbal. So I have learnt deeply about subtle communication and about our abilities to regulate, or dis-regulate. The plants have consistently been the strongest agents of change with the right information, and inspiration . They work at the subtlest levels of our soul as well as ground us with logic, and the ever expanding understanding of how all of nature communicates, responds and is connected.

I know a practise of drawing plants is a way to harness bio-available information. Through in-depth observation and artistic process we can harmonise with natural life giving forms. This affects our neurobiology and physiology, and we adjust our behaviour and thinking and personal balance.