About my work: Paul Reader is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer, in the School of Humanities, University of New England. His research interests are in visual arts, adult education and transformative learning. Over the last seven years his work has also contributed to teaching and research in professional development. Painterly Methodology: painting and digital inquiry in adult learning, his doctoral thesis (2007) explored visual methods in education research, with a strong emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, theory and inquiry through visual practice. Art & Learning Networks (ALN) his community development practice, has worked with community arts, indigenous, environment and adult education projects for over 30 years, with career origins as a Fine Art student exhibiting in British art festivals and galleries during the 1970s. More on: www.une.edu.au/staff/preader.php

About my work: My elementary school environmental education teaching left me searching for ways to deeply embed myself and my students in Nature. Through creating in general, and painting in particular, I found what I was looking for the day I painted the way a vase of tulips felt instead of the way it looked. I continue to be inspired by the transformative potential of creating with Nature. I now teach Artful Nature Communion courses in my studio, on-line, in Nature and at local schools. I am based on Salt Spring Island on the west coast of Canada.
In my newly released book Beauty Muse: Painting in communion with Nature I share my ten year journey of creative exploration with my muse, a Cecropian silk moth. In the book I invite the reader to engage in a highly intuitive hands-on practice that brings art-making back to its living roots and transforms relationships to self, others and Nature. My website www.creativebynature.org contains many images, “artivities” and resources for communing with Nature through the arts. I also invite you to join in artful exchange on my Ning at www.creativebynature.ning.com.

About my work: I am a dancer, writer, poet and educator, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, outside Vancouver, B.C., Canada. I have written numerous essays and poetry in various journals and chapters in books in the areas of the arts and embodiment and ams author of Embodied Prayer and co-author of Landscapes in Aesthetic Education. I focus on arts-based educational research methods which support both academic and artistic ways of writing and knowing and and teach ways of writing from the body and its connection to arts, ecological, contemplative and health education. My deep love of place has informed both my performative and poetic work and I continue to create and perform site-specific work in connection to the natural world.
I am currently working on a long-term site-specific project called, Ocean Poetics. I integrate autobiographical inquiry and arts-based research methods to create site-specific dance performance, poetry, and essays in the thresholds between land and sea. The body has a knowledge and wisdom all to itself, which is felt in the lived experience of fingers and toes, shoulders and hips, through the heart of veins and on the breath of limbs. Through a dedicated practice of integrating walking, dancing and writing over years, I connect a variety of arts-based research methods which honour embodied and poetic forms to create. The practice of walking and dancing within creation are inextricably linked to writing and performance. Out of this project in the last decade has emerged a variety of site-specific performances of poetry and dance including, the Port Moody Shoreline Park and Montague Marine Park on Galiano Island. Future sites are planned for connections to the Atlantic Ocean including New England and Ireland.

About my work: I am interested in the aesthetic connections we form with natural areas close to home, and the role that these connections play in helping preserve wild areas. Specifically, I am interested in how the arts can help build emotional bonds with other life forms.
One personal project I have done to better come to know a place consists of a series of drawings, done over the period of a year, of a set of woods close to my home. Once I completed each drawing, it was buried in the place where it was made, and the forest kept it there for me until I retrieved it next time. Finding the drawings, buried under logs, mounds of leaves, or in stumps, was a special task in itself, as I needed to remember the niches and details of the forest. Once the collection was done, the drawings were then photographed in the places where they were made.

About our work: In 2004, a group of young women, artists and culture workers met by chance and decided to arrange a down to earth and playful event for children. Lasten Aurinkojuhla, the Children's Sunfestival, was established at Kimito island in Finland at a paradise-like organic farm called Westers (www.westers.fi). The festival day was full of workshops in which children were offered natural and re-cycled materials, to make toys and fantasy costumes. The theatre and dance performances showed how immaterial consuming can give great moments of togetherness. At a tiny museum of natural history the children explored the world's greatness, through looking carefully at the shapes of bugs or leaves. The day was a success and the happy faces of the children and adults inspired us to continue working in ways that combine both environmental, art and hand craft education.
The Children's Sunfestival is a combination of the children's own fantasy, and the power of play and imagination. The child's own sense of aesthetics is in focus, their own need to play and explain the world through their imagination. Aurinkojuhla is a place for children to be children and it provides adults a chance to learn again how a less consumerist and less ready-made world provides an opening to a more natural way of living. At Aurinkojuhla, adults offer possibilities, but not ready-made models. That gives children more opportunity to get familiar with ecological choices. They can form and adjust their ideas through the most natural way of learning, which is play. The adults arrange the children's moments in the natural world, but the way they learn stems from their own creativity. Aurinkojuhla gives children opportunities to enjoy the very simple wonders of life, nature's shapes and feelings. At Aurinkojuhla, children are creators just like nature itself is.
Aurinkojuhla is arranged yearly at Westers farm and also in Somero, a small rural town in the south of Finland. During the years, the organisers of Aurinkojuhla have developed their methods while facilitatng various workshops, side-happenings and thematic days. In the summer of 2008 they published a book, entitled Lasten Aurinkovuosi (Children's Year of the Sun) that explores how different seasons offer different possibilities to engage in plays and to enjoy the simple wonders. In 2007 Aurinkojuhla received an award for its efforts in art education from Finland's Ministry of Culture.

About my work: I am from Istanbul, Turkey and currently live in Finland. In my education, my aim increasingly has become to "unlearn the learned," and to treat the universe as an open university. Stemming from my interest in alternative education and early childhood education I set out to gain more experience in outdoor education and the Reggio Emilia approach. I have been in Finland for almost two years now, working in kindergartens, exploring the beauties of Finnish nature and have been learning Finnish as well (the children are the best teachers in many aspects).

About our work: We support individuals and groups in the process of transition towards a low impact society.
Integrating modified exercises of artistic areas like acting and bodywork in accord with intellectual and visual input, we facilitate workshops which give access to a holistic understanding of the world and ourselves and allow to experience this understanding on a mental, physical and intuitive level.
 

About my work: I am a sculptor and art educator. My diploma was about open air sculpture and my PhD was about how environmental art can promote the students' environmental awareness. So, I usually design audiovisual material for my lessons or for conferences and workshops concerning art and science matters, mostly through education. Also, we are planning to have a group of three artists-educators that are going to propose some environmental art projects very soon.

About my work: I am a seeker learning from children the biological roots of aesthetic sense and beauty. Every year I conduct a workshop called "Sensing Nature; Knowing Nature"; to remind me of the ability of children when left alone and away from the intellectual and egoistic theories. (Beauty is a biological fact but art is a cultural construct.)

About my work: I have been running The Art School in my studio on Engeløya for 7 years. It is a part of the regional Culture and Music school, an ex-curriculum activity for children, and accommodates 25 students between 6 and 16. My aim is to give the students experiences that nurture their connections between their local environment and the process of creation. It is not about rights or wrongs, nor about marks or achievements. It is about being alive and aware! I want the children to push their own boundaries and explore new ways of thinking and making and coming to knowing. By giving them an arena and the tools for enquiry I encourage them to explore new ways of seeing and sensing that moves their perceptions and triggers their curiosity. The process develops their unique and creative language and also puts art in the wider context of a greater expression where nature unfolds and perpetually transforms all matter of life. Here you can get the taste of what we do.

About my work: From the early 1980's onwards I have been engaged in teaching children and youth about nature by taking them outside and to engage them in direct experiences: at farms and in school gardens. With Living School and Living Learning we have developed a programme in Norway called "the farm as a pedagogical resource"; I have a background as a teacher in biology at Waldorf schools, and over many years I have taken youth from 16-17 years of age on a 10 day botanical excursion to Fjelberg island. Beside botanizing plants, they get art tasks revolving around themes like "seeing green for the fist time", using water colours or pastells and other tools to capture some of what they find in their surroundings.

About my work: I am teaching at the moment in three different architecture schools, but used to teach environmental art a shorter period in university as well. I have also been organizing workshops for children, where we make environmental art in the forests, or 'art for animals', of things we find there.
In my own projects I like to think it is not only possible but highly necessary to try to fuse the notions of environmental art, visual art generally, and finally architecture into a functional whole.

About my work: I have been working with art in teachers education since 1977. Since 1985 I have developed a main interest in Nature Art Education. In 1991/92 I developed the cross-Nordic network kalled Esja. In 1997 this network made a visual presentation of children's land art from all the Nordic countries.
My experience with nature art education has mainly been concentrated on land art in our close surroundings. But situated in Grimstad in Norway, this means forest areas, parks and gardens, stone and sand morenes, and sea and water environments. Students have adapted ideas from land art and nature and created their own ideas in groups of three to four students. We have always been aware of the value of presenting the processes and products in visual exhibitions. This we call aesthetic documentation.
Throughout the years I have had the possibility to do small projects of nature art also with children and young people at several places in Norway. For the last ten years I have been concentrating more on environmental art (also as winter-art), site-specific art and even performance art in the works of the students.
 

In 2011, Jan-Erik Sørenstuen published the richly illustrated book Levende Spor (see to the right). An early version of the manuscript called Dancing Flowers - to discover nature through art, and art through nature, can be downloaded here (34 MB). And here you can download  the text Land art i Nesna 2008 (in Norwegian) (7 MB).

About my work: The inspiration for my work can come from many different places. Sometimes it's an object or location which inspires, and the natural materials I find. I love to make things with my hands. Often I read about the history of a place, and then go and search for the location. Materials I choose to use are inspired by the location, a particular event in the past either mythical or real, the geology of the landscape or the weather. It's a combination of things that shapes my ideas. I like to place the objects I've made in the landscape they are about, and document them with my camera. I like to learn new craft skills too - it may be the traditional use for a material found at a location which decides the direction a new piece of work will take. I like to draw detail not the vast landscape. Pocket size books to take with me, and a black rollerball pen to draw, not pencil. The books are bound by me, and often include my own handmade papers, they become objects too.

About my work: Chris Fremantle is a freelance arts researcher, producer and fundraiser. He has developed and/or managed a number of significant art/nature/environment projects including Place of Origin, Aberdeenshire, Scotland; Cairngorm Mountain Art Project, Aviemore, Scotland; and Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison's Greenhouse Britain project. Fremantle is a Research Associate with On The Edge Research at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen.

About our work: Niall and I are the directors of a project called Rewilding Childhood, a new media initiative highlighting how children across Europe experience wild nature and investigating how that affects their social and emotional development.
When it comes to children’s direct enjoyment of nature, marked cultural divisions have emerged in Europe in the space of just one generation. Now, in many places, their freedom to enjoy wild nature is being severely curtailed.
By creating contemporary, conceptual imagery and combining it with soundscapes, we hope to act as resource for the effective communication of these concerns to the widest possible audience at a time when interest is at an all time high.
Our work is aimed at anyone concerned with how we bring up our children and the sorts of experiences we give them. We provide ideas and inspiration for parents and educators keen to encourage their children’s experience of wild nature while also promoting children’s right of access to green spaces and their freedom to enjoy them.
Rewilding Childhood can almost be seen as a promoter of nature education initiatives that already exist, we ourselves don’t actually run a programme but work to promote and connect those already working with these areas.

Niall Benvie has worked as a professional Wildlife Photographer for over 15 years. He is the author and illustrator of three internationally published books and a founding fellow of the international league of Conservation Photographers. www.ImagesfromtheEdge.com

Cat Lee-Marr is a freelance sound artist and researcher exploring the nature of our relationship with the environment and how sound can influence this. A fairly recent graduate Cat hopes to return to university to complete a Masters. www.catleemarr.co.uk

About our work: As a team of artists and outdoor educators we are dedicated to creating hands-on nature discovery programming for children and communities.
By combining Nature, Art & Science with creative inquiry, we seek to develop new ways of seeing, interacting with, and understanding the natural world.

About my work: My journey as an artist began during my childhood in Northern California, where I loved to make constructions on the beach from sand, rocks, and seaweed. Throughout my life, I've created art from and in nature as a personal practice. Since 2004 I've focused on the social and environmental dimensions of my art - hosting group art-making events and workshops, teaching in public and private schools, training teachers and museum staff, and installing hands-on "Create-With-Nature Zones" in parks, schools, museums, and public spaces. My endeavors are in the tradition of social sculpture, in service to nature and to society. Collaboration with other artists, environmentalists, scientists, educators, and parents is key to my work. I strive to create models and methods for collective creativity; to connect people of all ages with each other and with the natural world; and to inspire joy, spontaneity, and environmental action.

About my work: I am an associate professor of art education at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, inspired by the work of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Both of these men believed in the unity of all living beings. I am interested in using art activities that are based on Froebelian and Goethian ideals to re-acquaint children with their bond to the natural world, to help them build personal relationships with nature, and to provide them with ways to express their curiosity, wonder, and dialogue with the natural world.
 

About my work: I am interested in the connection between art and the natural world, and helping teachers become aware and informed to teach students about this. The book, Art Education and Eco Awareness, a Teacher’s Guide to Art and the Natural Environment, is a result of that concern. The unique biodiversity and wilderness of our planet spark a desire to protect a few special places. I try to capture the spirit of those places as I paint with overlapping brushstrokes of color, spatial relationships, tension, and strong rhythm. My hope is to connect with others in a concern for a world with wilderness, to share in Rachel Carson’s “sense of wonder” through my book and paintings.

Click below to view sample pages from Heather's book, in PDF:
  Plants: Gardens
  Sky: Artist Activist
 

About my work: Los Padillas is an ongoing educational, environmental project in the south valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, The project started with an educational component on water. Intensive workshops were conducted in the local Elementary school. The students designed various water catchment systems. Their input formed the final design. Medium: ends of propane tanks, steel, river rocks, gravel, plantings
To download the book 'Reflections on Water; The Story of Los Padillas', go to www.bridgingtothearts.org

About my work: It is my premise that in order to effect cultural change in human relationship to environment, we must begin at the youngest age to promote understanding and stewardship. My educational programs are aligned with my art practice goals, providing ways for children to enter, explore, engage with, and reflect on their local landscapes. I mostly work with children from preschool age through high school, and have done this in several formats, from small group one hour workshops, to large multi-grade group day long events, to long term projects.

About my work: I have written Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology, a college textbook series (Artnow Publications).

1. ECOcentric Topics: Pioneering Themes for Eco-Art, 2006
ECOcentric Topics: Pioneering Themes for Eco-Art explores how the burgeoning environmental movement is reformulating popular cultural values. Ten contemporary artists manifest the shift away from attitudes that are species-centered (anthropocentric) and self-centered (egocentric). Instead, they present intentions and behaviors that are habitat-centered (eco-centric). By combining the principles of ecological science and the values of sustainability, these artists redefine such elemental principles as “nature,” “desire,” “globalism,” “power,” and “death.” Suggestions for student art projects are included.

2. Cycle-Logical Art: Recycling Matters for Eco-Art, 2007
Cycle-Logical Art: Recycling Matters for Eco-Art assembles eleven artists whose ingenious schemes divert waste and cast-offs from the purgatory of landfills. These artists display cycle-logic by transforming material discards into resources that replenish the earth’s ecosystems. Some artists invent ways to reuse rejected and defunct materials. Some recycle. Others reform wasteful material habits. Cycle-Logical Art establishes the context for these diverse explorations by presenting a synopsis of the history of garbage, analyzing the primary substances responsible for material glut, and guiding readers in selecting sustainable art mediums. Projects guide student explorations of art strategies that assure the well-being of the Earth.