Environmental Arts

Working with environmental arts is a way of engaging with our current or on-going issues whilst working in nature. Here we can find our voice and express our deepest desires, fears and longings through our interface with the natural world. We can further investigate the core themes of our lives whilst embracing the metaphor and holding that nature so beautifully provides.  

With this approach each month of the year and every season provides an opportunity to explore what is arising in our emotional world and the corresponding tasks that reflect these energies. The expression of these deeply held feelings allows them to move through us, enabling us to feel freer and more liberated from their hold. Working in a beautiful woodland gives us an enormous creative canvas for expressing this inner landscape. 

Through following the Celtic calendar, we begin the year in November when the seeds fall and begin their journey of incubation within the belly of the earth. Here we move into the most deeply (archetypal) feminine time of the year where stillness falls, and our energies traditionally go within.  

At this time of year, I might invite you to make a ‘fairy trail’ that describes in miniature, the course of your life, the highs and the lows. You might use a snail shell to symbolise a time of loss and grief, where you journeyed far inside yourself. The joys of a birth or a new beginning might be symbolised by a feather to mark this transition. The language of nature is yours to inhabit and your life story through your fairy trail will always be entirely unique. It is an opportunity to hear yourself in the telling of your story. 

Different times of year bring different energies and in early spring I might invite you to work with clay to craft a face that expresses something of the fear or pain that sits within you. In meeting and representing these feelings, we give voice to that which may be firmly lodged in the shadows. You may decide to place this clay effigy at the roots of a tree to be transformed by time and nature and because it is at the roots of things that these deep and dangerous feelings lie.  

You may enjoy this way of working if you love… ‘Nature and wish to learn a practical ecopsychology whereby the issues that entrap and disempower us can be taken into the woods, addressed and transformed.’ It is also for those who …..’long for meaningful ritual and seek to make it a living part of their lives…….who love the magical language of metaphor and its boundless power to manifest change’. Ian Siddons-Heginworth (2008) 

This way of working is guided and informed by the work of Ian Siddons-Heginworth who wrote the extraordinary book Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life (2008) which he developed from over 20 years of working with clients in this way. I undertook my Circle of Trees Specialist Practitioner training in Devon with Marianne Siddons Heginworth who has worked alongside Ian for many years and has brought her own deep learning, writing and experiencing to this field.  

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