Our collaboration began in 2010 as a two-day inquiry with a ThinkingWall. A large-scale image|text work-in-process Everything is Here emerged as a thought-piece that combined writing, collage and drawing. Working mantras from this artwork - ‘ecology is relationship’ ‘new Rhythms’ ‘mindfulness of the body is the body’s mindfulness’ - offered guidance and material engagements for our artistic practices.

  • A White woman, born on Zimbabwean soil, Miche has French and Jewish heritage and is based in UK. Her devotional vocation is rooted in a passion for art, ecology, food, and liberation. These passions interconnect through her therapeutic arts training, combined with a liberation counselling practice, her socially engaged body of work as an ecological artist, and nurtured within a Zen kitchen as a contemplative cook.

    Tuning into the cohesive power of ritual she hosts convivial spaces for skills sharing, knowledge generation and co-creation. These are curated within an ecology of embodied, emancipatory arts and earthcentred ritual practices which are in service to freedom kinships for collective liberation. Commissioners include Home Live Art, TEdx Soweto, Royal Geographic Society, Thames Festival, Stellenbosch University, Triangle Arts Trust.

    Within the realm of research and ecological design Miche has innovated participatory, collaborative and decolonising methodologies. Her doctoral scholarship with Coventry University in partnership with the Sustainability Institute in South Africa, evolved the concept of sympoiethics. The concept honours a way of living ecologically and ethically as humans in respectful, response-able co-evolution within a participatory cosmos.

  • Flora is a British born, white woman based in the UK. At the heart of Flora’s creative practice is honouring and tending to our entangled relationships with the life of place – a thread that weaves through her work within human geography, landscape architecture and intuitive plant and land care.

    Integral to her landscape design, doctoral studies, policy research and arts practice is her dedication to attending to people’s diverse experiences and tuning into the ecology of place. Commissioners include the UK Department for Education, NHS Hospital Trust, National Trust, Creative Partnerships, Playlink, and Maggie’s Centre.

    Through co-creative exchanges with Miche, Flora has developed collaborative approaches to practice-based research, multi-media documentation and the co-curation of spaces for collective inquiry. Her studio drawing practice helps makes visible the subtle energies of these unfolding journeys of knowledge co-creation with each other and the animate world. This commitment to engaging with wider fields of knowing is supported and enlivened by her training and practice in organisational constellations.

Art of sympoiethics

As Artist Researchers in Residence at the Centre for Agrocology Water and Resilience and through Miche’s doctoral research at the Sustainability Institute, South Africa, Miche pioneered the concept of sympoiethics. ‘Sym’ refers to together or with, ‘poiesis’ calls inthe co-creative process of coming to life, and ‘ethics’ is rooted in the term ‘ethe’ meaning the character or principles emerging from dwelling in place.

As an artful methodology, sympoiethics is rooted in participatory consciousness and in the recognition that the world comes into being through entanglement, collective production, and making-with. In fostering embodied and emergent ways of living, sympoiethics restores radical and everyday ways of knowing rendered invisible through colonialist Western systems of knowledge-making.

Published material

  • Art of Sympoiethics in the Ecological Citizen explores our collaborative arts practice as rooted in an ecocentric worldview, in which existence is a continuum of relational and embodied exchanges between ourselves, each other, and the matter and habitats of the animate Earth.

  • We are honoured to be contributing our book chapter to this visionary book Subtle Agroecologies: farming with the hidden half of nature edited by Julia Wright.

  • This article in The Learned Pig explores how natureculture worldmaking can encourage an everyday ethics of healing and care.

  • Curated by Bronwyn Lace and the Centre for the Less Good Idea, this one minute film Tending emerges from our project For the Love of a Field.