Institution
Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT)
Medium
Visual Communication
Graduation Year
Class of 2026
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My practice explores relationship, belonging, and the ways creativity can deepen our connection with the living world. Working across poetry, photography, drawing, design, and participatory practice, I investigate how attentiveness, imagination, and embodied experience can cultivate a greater sense of kinship with place and more-than-human life. This body of work emerged through my MA in Design for Change, where an enquiry into ecological design gradually evolved into a broader exploration of interconnectedness, reciprocity, kincentric stewardship, and participation within living systems. Yet the roots of this exploration reach further back. A sense of connection to the natural world — often felt more strongly than my connection to many of the human systems surrounding it — has long shaped how I experience and move through life. The research did not create this orientation, but offered language, insight, and creative pathways through which it could be explored more consciously and understood more deeply. As the work unfolded, the boundary between enquiry and personal experience became increasingly porous. Walking, observing, photography, sketchbooking, drawing, writing, and making became ways of understanding in themselves. These embodied creative practices formed a methodology through which knowledge could emerge through experience, reflection, and relationship. Creativity shifted from being a means of communicating ideas to becoming a way of listening, sensing, and engaging with the world. Much of the work is informed by time spent in conversation with land, plants, water, weather, and the subtle rhythms of everyday life. Through these encounters, relationship became less an abstract concept and more a lived experience. Trees, rivers, insects, landscapes, and seasons emerged as teachers within the enquiry, offering perspectives on reciprocity, interdependence, care, and belonging that extend beyond human-centred ways of understanding. The artworks, poems, photographs, publications, and design artefacts presented here emerged through this ongoing process of exploration. Together, they reflect an attempt to translate personal experience, creative enquiry, and relational understanding into forms that can be shared with others. While each work offers its own perspective, collectively they explore how creativity might help reveal pathways into relationship… supporting moments of reflection, attentiveness, and reconnection with the living world. At its heart, this practice is an exploration of how creative practice can nurture a deeper sense of kinship with life, while contributing to conversations around stewardship, collective flourishing, and the futures we are continuously shaping together. Rather than offering answers, the work seeks to open small invitations… to notice, to imagine, and to remember our participation within the wider web of relationships that sustain all life.
