The existential threat evolving out of climate change and the ecological crisis drew me to question my relationship with the materials in my practice. In examining theories that regard the material world ethically and inclusively, I asked, ‘Is there a way of reconsidering agency and autonomy in matter?’ I found answers in the rebuttal of anthropocentrism by post humanism and aligning philosophical principles of New Materialism. This work questions the Enlightenment era’s dualist narratives that inform society’s unethical interface with materiality and strives to extend a view of vitality, agency, interconnectivity and social phenomena to matter beyond the human.
Throughout this process, I began to see parallels between the willow and my embodied self and the confines of a projected ontological framework that serves to limit, isolate and exploit.
