Practices:

• Walk-and-draw: wander your local environment, tracing what catches your attention—species, debris, scars on the land, absences as much as presences
• Artist introductions: Cecilia Vicuña, Ana Mendieta, and contemporary eco-visual practitioners whose work navigates grief, kinship, and ecological imagination. Please look them up online as they both have extensive material that I am sure will inspire you.
• Experiment with found natural materials for poetic illustration or collage, working toward forms that integrate place and affect.

Exercise
Design a visual poem or image-collage using bioregional materials that reflect intersections of ecological grief and family memory. As you work, engage with Elspeth Probyn’s insights from Shame in the Habitus, asking: how does shame inflect what is visible, or what we allow to be seen? What stories or presences remain hidden, and what might be the consequences of making them visible?

‘O’psis – spectacle
Bourdieu reminds us:

“One has to situate oneself within ‘real activity’ as such, that is in the practical relation to the world, the preoccupied, active presence in the world through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its things to be said and done, things made to be said, which directly govern words and deeds without ever unfolding as spectacle.”

Yet the Anthropocene stages its own spectacle: accelerated loss. The extinction of species, the erosion of habitats, the fraying of local protections in the face of global crises. As Bristow writes, ecological witnessing demands “heightened bioregional imaginations and a new ecocosmopolitan ethics.” In this light, to look is not to consume, but to hold a vigil.

A meditation / reflection:

This week, consider the act of seeing as a ritual. Approach your walk, your drawing, your collage, as offerings—documents that do not simply represent, but participate in the life and loss they address. How does your image bear witness without turning grief into spectacle? How might it trace lines of kinship across time, place, and species? How does your perspective affect your perception of these surroundings, and your memory of them?