MOVING WITH NATURE
During summer 2025, as part of my master’s research in Arts, Health & Wellbeing, I led Moving with Nature, a series of outdoor movement and art-making workshops for the rural queer community in Bannau Brycheiniog.The project explored how the diversity and fluidity of nature might affirm queer peoples experiences, and support visibility and belonging in a landscape where queer lives are often overlooked.
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In designing the project, the Moving with Nature Card Deck was created, offering springboards into artful, embodied encounters with rivers, forests, and mountains of Bannau Brycheiniog. The cards were inspired by queer ecology pioneer Catriona Mortimer-Sandiland’s understanding that "relationships between and among plants, soil, insects, weather, animals - in particular locations, can give rise to really complex, resilient communities"1.
The creativity that emerged during the workshops offered room to reflect on the many ways that queer lived experience can be mirrored by the landscape, allowing freedom to move, dance, and make in ways that felt authentic to our bodies and identities. Together, we created spaces for rest and presence, for queer expression to emerge, and, through the arts, make sense of our connections with the world around us.
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​​​​​Huge thanks to the artists involved, whose contributions to the project highlighted the possibilities for queer arts spaces to flourish in our rural landscape.
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Sending gratitude to the human and more-than-human community of Penpont, for their generosity in supporting this project.
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And to Tom Moulsdale, and the good people of Malwen, whose queer ecology workshop at Brithdir Mawr inspired me to explore ways of bringing my own practice to the field.​​​​
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Read on to find out more.....
"The idea of “queer ecology” seems to have been very generative, sometimes in gloriously surprising ways! but one of the most interesting directions, for me, concerns queering forms of ecological community."
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Catriona Mortimer‑Sandilands
"This being queer, it’s not trying to pretend anymore, or having to put on another mask. But to just feel into what it’s like today...and there will be another day, and that will feel slightly different too”
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Moving with Nature Participant
Prompts from the Moving with Nature Card Deck - offering 15 pathways to see, be, and listen with the land.
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Art Making Process​
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Moving with Nature embraced a participatory art-making approach, enabling participants to self-represent in ways that felt most meaningful - moving fluidly across artforms. The artworks emerged as moving images, objects, drawings, writing, embodied gestures and performative actions. ​​
As Patricia Leavy, a leader in arts-based research, whose work inspired this project explains, the arts can "connect us with those who are similar and dissimilar, open up new ways of seeing and experiencing, and illuminate that which otherwise remains in darkness” 2​​
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​​​The following gallery highlights the groups chosen artworks, stories, and reflections on their experiences moving with the forest, river and mountain. To accompany each landscape, is an invitation from the Moving with Nature Card Deck, offered here as a way for viewers to connect with the artists work and to explore creativity with nature. You may wish to bring a journal with you to sketch, or write about your experiences.
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We hope the following artworks and invitations bring you quiet moments of joy, inspire playful curiosity and offer new ways to explore your own relationship with nature.
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F O R E S T
An Invitation to Move with Nature
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Finding Your Place
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Find a place to be with Nature
Using all of your senses, begin to gather a group of natural objects
Assemble your objects together
Pause to notice the differences and relationships between each one
Join in with your objects
Explore moving between them, around them, among them
Where do you belong most in this moment?
When you have finished, thank each one and return them to the land.
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Finding Your Place
Images & words, by Carli Ma, 2025​
"One of the challenges I live with is how I'm read in the world. I'm straight presenting. I'm a Mother. There are parts of me that don't get seen inside those labels. Parts that are misunderstood, or don't always have space to breathe and express."
“I moved the soil and leaves to create a circle. It felt intuitive. I was really dancing with the shapes, sounds, birds noises. It felt embodied, expressive. I was really meeting myself in the moment.”
"Knees press soil
Hands sweep leaves
Circle.
A place appears
Wood strikes wood
Resonance in my bones
Thud
Here I am placed
Between Stone, Stick, Feather
Remembered."
Charcoal on paper
"What feels true for me is staying in the dance between what's visible, and what's lived. Letting those unseen layers move, speak, and shape me anyway.
That's where the alchemy is.
We are so much more than how we present."
Forest Score, 2025
R I V E R
An Invitation to Move with Nature
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Embodied Surfaces
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Take yourself to a soft place
Allow your senses to gently awaken as you meet the ground, edges, and surfaces
Stay as you are
Or expand this moment by becoming the textures and surfaces of this place
How does it feel to move as water, sand, or rock?.
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Gender Fool At The Water’s Edge
Images & words, by Karn John, 2025​
“How can I be in softness and sensuality?
Like water, that feels so fluid.
Like I’m not doing it as a performative act.
How is it just to feel it, and embody it?"
“I put my head in the water to feel how that was. Looking upside down along the waters edge. Seeing things, the world upside down.”​
M O U N T A I N
An Invitation to Move with Nature
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Step Into The Light
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Find a place to be with Nature
Gently allow yourself to be seen by rock, tree, bird
Nature embraces you, just as you are
Imagine that you're invisible
How might you blend into the landscape?
Swaying like a branch, curling up like a rock,
or disappearing into the earth
Let yourself wonder, and play with this new outlook
When you're ready,
Step back into the light
Parkland Score, 2025
Gender Fool Exploring Their Edges and Strength
Images & words, by Karn John, 2025
“It’s just enjoying being in my body. The sturdiness, and the queerness.
This body is how it is.
How it feels.
That being seen, coming out of hiding, being witnessed and perceived.
That performance I’ve done for so long of femininity.
To feel that acceptance.”
"Moving from merging to emboldening resistance. Daring to be seen. Moving in relationship with dead wood and new life brimming from this offering of decay.“
MOVING WITH NATURE, 2025
1 Sandilands, C. & Neimanis, A., 2018. A Very Queer Nature: On Queer Ecologies, Gardens, and Flourishing Multispecies Practices. Sydney: Sydney Environment Institute
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2 Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art : arts-based research practice. New York: The Guilford Press, p.ix.
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Jess Tanner, 2026