ART OF NATURE
This page is still taking shape. Consider this the beginning.
ART OF NATURE
Modern society has become extraordinarily skilled at recognizing, legitimizing, and funding contributions it can readily measure. We know how to value a scientific discovery, a legal victory, or an ecological intervention. Art moves through the world differently. A song can bring thousands of people into relationship with a whale. A film can change how an audience encounters a forest. A ritual can create a place for collective grief. A story can bring something distant into intimacy, relationship, memory, and care.
Art of Nature is a living library and growing archive of artists and creative works placing their creativity, platforms, and life force in service to the living world and multispecies liberation.
It is a place for discovery, documentation, connection, and inspiration. Art of Nature does not represent artists, produce or manage projects, or operate as an agency or arts institution. It gathers and points toward work already happening across the world, making it easier to find and helping illuminate a larger cultural movement already underway.
At the heart of this library is curiosity about the roles art can play alongside science, ecology, law, education, organizing, Indigenous knowledge, Rights of Nature, and movements working toward the flourishing and liberation of the larger community of life. What becomes possible when these ways of knowing, creating, and working encounter one another?
Science can reveal astonishing realities about a whale, a forest, a watershed, a fungal network, an atmosphere. Law can create new forms of recognition, responsibility, and protection. Organizing can gather people into collective action. Artists can carry these realities into song, story, image, movement, film, theatre, poetry, ritual, and shared cultural experience. Art can help something become felt. It can create relationship across distance. It can give grief somewhere to move. It can awaken wonder, devotion, attention, imagination, and participation. It can help a culture remember what it loves.
Across the world, artists are already exploring these possibilities. Musicians are composing with birds and forests. Filmmakers are bringing audiences into intimate relationship with threatened beings and places. Poets are giving language to ecological grief and kinship. Theatre makers are working alongside researchers and communities. Artists are collaborating with scientists, ecologists, lawyers, organizers, and Indigenous knowledge holders. Ritual makers are creating ways for communities to grieve, honor, celebrate, and respond to the living world together.
Art of Nature gathers these threads into one living library so they can be more easily witnessed, discovered, and connected. The archive documents and uplifts what is already happening while inviting greater curiosity about what creative practice can contribute in relationship with other movements and disciplines.
Perhaps an ecologist encounters an artist whose work opens a new possibility for collaboration. A Rights of Nature lawyer discovers a musician, filmmaker, poet, or theatre maker whose practice speaks to their work. An artist encounters scientific research that changes the direction of their creative practice. An organization begins imagining artists as collaborators within the work itself. Artists find one another across disciplines and geographies. And someone encountering this library for the first time begins asking: What could my particular creative gifts offer the living world?
Popular culture already shapes what we desire, remember, love, mourn, protect, and imagine possible. What might happen if more of that creative power entered into relationship with Rivers, Fungi, Whales, Forests, Birds, Oceans, and the larger community of life?
Art of Nature is a place to keep gathering that question and the many responses to it already emerging around the world.
The intention is simple: to make this work easier to find, easier to witness, easier to connect with, and easier to imagine joining.
SOME PLACES TO BEGIN
As this living library grows, we begin by pointing toward a few works and collaborations that expand our imagination of the roles art can play in relationship with the living world.
Song of the Cedars
Created by Cosmo Sheldrake with Robert Macfarlane, Giuliana Furci, César Rodríguez-Garavito, and the Los Cedros Cloud Forest in Ecuador, Song of the Cedars brings music, field recording, ecology, storytelling, and law into direct collaboration. The forest itself is credited as a co-creator, and the project has pursued legal recognition of Los Cedros as a moral co-author of the work. Sounds recorded within the forest, including birds, bats, monkeys, leaves, and soil, become part of the composition itself.
Empatheatre | South Africa
Empatheatre brings artists, researchers, communities, and other knowledge holders together through research-based theatre. Emerging from South Africa, its work transforms collaborative research and lived experience into performances that create spaces for listening, dialogue, meaning-making, and public participation. Projects such as Lalela uLwandlehave woven together coastal communities’ stories, environmental concerns, ocean heritage, and questions of ocean governance, while newer work explores land, extraction, ecological justice, and relationships among humans, ancestors, and other beings.
These are not projects Hearthwood represents. They are examples of work already happening in the world that expands our imagination of what art can do, whom it can collaborate with, and what forms of participation it can make possible.
Only a minimal fraction of the extraordinary work already happening across the world has found its way into this library. That is precisely why it exists. Art of Nature is intended to grow as more artists, projects, collaborations, experiments, and practices at the intersection of art and the living world become known, creating a shared place where this emerging field can begin to see itself.
Are you, or someone you know, creating in this territory? Please point Art of Nature toward what is missing. The hope is that this growing library can help artists discover one another, help scientists, ecologists, lawyers, organizers, and Rights of Nature practitioners find artists already working in this field, and inspire more artists to imagine what their own creative practice might offer the larger community of life.
Please fill out this simple form to suggest an artist, project, or collective for the growing archive.