Communicating with Plants and Place through Sensory Drawing

Sensory drawing is the aesthetic practice of recording a cognitive process through tracing mental imagery that emerges in a different state of consciousness. Images are drawn with eyes closed as they appear in the mind’s eye while visiting distinct sites or while sitting across a plant. By blocking out the visual senses, sensory channels are opened up for intensified perception and the sketches evolve from the reverberation with a place or plants. The drawings are conceptual in nature as the mark making comes about as the outcome of a perceptual activity, not an act of physical seeing and representational depiction. Hence, the art practice embodies a post-humanist subject positioning that renders the subject of knowledge –the experiencing self– as embedded in the world and intertwined within a web of relations with non-human others(1). Through the potential emergence of unexpected elements beyond one’s own embodiment, the practice epitomizes a pattern of ‘thinking with’ (in a Haraway’s sense) or rather a ‘feeling-with’ when the world is sensed in its abundance of storied places and beings. The drawings visualize a multispecies attunement in form of a portray of intuitive communication and enchanted co-creation. Keywords: Sensory drawing, posthumanism, other-than-human, sympoiesis, conceptual drawing