Movement is our primary way of sensing and being in the world.
What am I making and discovering during this residency?
How we move through the world shapes how we relate, make, and understand our connections: to family, to work, to food, to place, and to one another. It influences how we access the resources we need to live well and how we participate in everyday life. For me, this is embodied research.
Pathways meander, loop, pause, and intensify. Walking is rarely a simple A-to-B journey. Unlike travelling by car or exercising to achieve a measurable goal, walking slows us down. It amplifies somatic awareness, allowing us to notice changing rhythms: insects, flowers, wind moving through trees, bark textures, roots wrapped around stone, fungi, and the countless more-than-human relationships unfolding around us. The landscape becomes rich, alive, and dynamic. This is what I think of as performative materiality. Aliveness.
As an ecosomatic artist, movement is one of my primary research tools. Walking, squatting, carrying, observing, gathering, and making are not separate activities; they are part of one continuous conversation between body and landscape.Through the lenses of bioarchaeology and biomechanics, and Wolff’s Law. I am interested in how bone adapts to the forces we place upon it, and how these relationships might help us rethink contemporary health, ecology, and resilience.
During this residency, my practice unfolds through three simple, everyday actions:
To walk // gathering local knowledge, searching for clay and mineral sources, foraging, collecting soils for chromatography, and making terra sigillata.
To squat // creating a daily series of clay actions that become Body Lithics, ceramic forms emerging from the rested squat.
To carry // carrying groceries, clay, stones, and weight through everyday life, extending movement beyond the gym into a richer, biodiverse relationship with the environments I inhabit.
These actions become verbs, gestures, and traces. They are leading me deeper into questions of Mesolithic mobility, movement ecology, mechanosensory bone cells, and the mineral relationships between body, soil, rock, and clay. My role is both player and storyteller, moving across multiple timescales while trying to fing patterns that interpaly with balance, especially when that balance is never found in stillness, noticing the unsettled and playing with those sensations.
That is the practice.
That is EcoSensing.
Increasingly, I see it as both a research strategy and a way of cultivating multiple forms of awareness simultaneously.
Perhaps what we have forgotten is that movement itself is a form of thinking. We often say we have no time, yet we divide our lives into isolated compartments—work, travel, eating, exercise, leisure, family. No wonder we feel mentally fatigued.
This residency is giving me permission to slow down, to be curious, to play, and to better understand the changing landscape of my own body in midlife. It is also an opportunity to question inherited ways of regulating movement, productivity, and value, and to imagine more ecological, embodied ways of living.
How might changing the way we move change the way we care—for ourselves, for one another, and for the environments we inhabit?
