Louisa Chase is a British ecological artist who has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for 18 years and is currently spending time back in the UK based in Lincoln.
Working across practices including movement, nature immersion, writing, walking, painting with handmade paints, natural printmaking, photographic recording, and video she explores through embodied inquiry our oft-forgotten reciprocal relationship with more-than-human kin and with all of life. She experiences the body-mind as a subtle receiver, a kind of antenna and fractal of the whole.
Her writing and artwork have been included in the online journal of The Dark Mountain Project and she was selected as featured artist for October 2022 by Art.Earth. Her paintings have been exhibited in group shows at The New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts and private and community galleries in Wellington, New Zealand.
In this short essay ecological artist and writer Louisa Chase sets out on a new path, revealing how, in times of ecological collapse, two foundational but previously background aspects of her life - walking and plant medicine - have suddenly moved to centre stage, becoming a new focus for her creative practice.
Part meditation on the agency of the more-than-human, part insight into the inner workings and concerns of a creative practitioner, her writing reflects on the invisible archaic layers of place, on the everyday, and on the need to move away from the cult of the artist, from art as consumable towards a more democratic and counter-colonial reality.
Skin to skin: The Art of Listening with the Soles
Essay
