How can I work to understand what plants and trees through spending time with them, observing them, and reenacting their lived history through my own body? My focus is on healing, but also on refocusing energies and thoughts on the similarities between humans and the “more-than-human”, trees and plants, on nature itself. The purpose is not to simply produce botanical illustrations, but to reflect and relate on the living presence and persistence of plants as living beings through body processes.
As a child, I found solace from a troubled home life out-of-doors and developed an attachment to the plants and trees that thrived in the Mediterranean climate of San Diego from around the world that I encountered. Now, living in Michigan, I see the same plants and trees as houseplants and in specialized greenhouses, and am happy to recognize them thriving in a place far away from where I was born. All of these plants were cultivated and relocated to new places by humans and have a connection to what goes on around them, through human care and neglect, and climate ecosystems.
As a new practice I have been spending a few hours each observing and painting them, and writing a little about the circumstances then and now, the human drama that unfolds around me in public spaces as I paint each plant or tree, and the place that they are in. Observing and drawing flora for an hour or two has been the only way in my life I have been able to enter the meditative state, and I am scheduling this restorative practice once or twice a week. At the same time, I am studying and enacting somatic healing exercises that have to do with working with trauma as memories stored in the human body, processing and releasing these energies through movement.
