Labours of care: Art practice and urban ecological restoration

Abstract

This research reveals how an art practice built around ethics of care offers a means of enacting an ecological responsibility. As cities and their human populations continue to grow, urban creeks and green spaces are becoming increasingly important and contested. Habitat loss for non-human species increases the need to care for these places. My volunteer work as a ‘Friend of Merri Creek’ in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, prompted this practice-based research which has explored practices of care as both subject matter and method. I argue that the processual, repetitive and labour-intense nature of my practice are qualities shared by environmental restoration work. This led me to ask: What could my art practice, based in print and textiles, reveal about practices of ecological restoration and degradation at an urban creek? I have set out to explore this question by bringing Merri Creek and my art practice closer together, using the meditative and repetitive acts of walking, weeding, planting, sewing and printing with locally collected plant dye.

Through studio and field-based investigation, I have established a way to observe contemporary and historic actions that have altered the Merri Creek ecosystem. Further, through an exploration of process, repetition and labour, I have found ways to produce artworks that manifest through—and reveal—practices of care. My research culminated in three works, brought together in an installation at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, together with an exegetical text. Building and departing from feminist debates surrounding an ‘ethics of care’, I draw on the work of theorists that approach care from materialist, ecological and practice-based standpoints. If care is a way of seeing and acting in the world in which interdependency and relationships are foregrounded and the potential to take responsibility is raised, then my examination of care as practice and method of art, and its interpretation, offers a path through which to navigate an increasingly precarious world.