What is Queer Eco Somatics?
Queer Eco Somatics explores the intimate encounters between the queer body and the earth, using physical and sensory engagement with natural landscapes and materials as a transformational artistic and healing process. This practice reclaims natural, instinctive bodily movement and expression, challenging and expanding beyond human habits. Through these sensate interactions, we explore the possibilities of being in the body and moving through life in fluid, expansive ways. What emerges in our sense of gender, sexuality, and sensuality when we surrender to the natural world? How do these encounters help us unmake and reshape our embodied identities?
Living amidst Dartmoor’s ancient landscape, I draw inspiration from its granite tors, water bodies, and dense mosses. These elements are central to my exploration of queer kinship, where human and non-human interactions blur. Through improvised movement and ritual, I create a dialogue between my body and the earth, allowing the landscape to become a co-creator in my artistic practice.
Artistic Work
My artistic performances have included:
· Rituals of Rest (2022): Developed during a period of long COVID, this practice involves daily rituals of stillness and rest within the landscape, using the healing power of rock and stone. This exploration of slowing down serves as a queering of time, embracing nature’s non-linear, cyclical rhythms as a radical act of somatic healing. The practice evolved into an installation that invites participants to engage in their own rituals of rest.
· Plunge (2021): A ritualistic performance where I use a kitchen plunger as a divination tool to unblock energy within the landscape and the body. By plunging into rock, seaweed, and sky, I create shambolic rituals that awaken the interaction between the human body and the earth body, inviting a flow of energy that reconnects us to our intuitive, instinctual selves.
· Seagrass (2021): This work explores gender queerness in the liminal space between land and sea. Through movement, I explore the queer potential of existing in these in-between spaces, where boundaries continuously shift and reshape.
· Natural Drag (2021) : Using natural materials as costume and prop, this practice explores how these elements can shift and awaken new movement languages and expressions of gender and sexuality. It’s a messy, experimental blend of human and natural elements that evokes powerful, physical expressions of identity.
· Underworld: A Site-Specific Ritual Performance Dance Film (2019): An autobiographical film set on the coastal site in Beer, Devon. The dancer’s journey into the implicit realm reflects the choreography of selective mutism, encountering landscapes of desolation, grief, and shame, and finding restoration in the waters, seas, and caves of the Devon coast.
· Swan, Thames River Bed (2017): A movement improvisation for camera, where I embody the experience of being human among swans, exploring the process of "becoming swan."
· Site-Specific Dance Film - Nunhead Cemetery, London (2015): A movement improvisation for camera, channeling the presence of the cemetery and resonating with the human and animal stories, memories, and traces within this space.
Queer Ecosomatics facilitation
I have collaborated with the LGBTQ+ Arts Organisation Queer Circle, where I have facilitated workshops that blend environmental arts with eco-somatic practices to support queer communities. In 2024 I facilitated “Winter Wilding” alongside Artist and psychotherapist Ly Orrock. We also created a series of workshops for trans and non bimary people. Workshops like "Beyond Peripheries" and "Queer Earth" invite participants to engage their senses in conversation with the landscape through movement, ritual, rest, and art-making. These experiences foster a deep connection with the natural world, helping participants explore a sense of belonging that is inherently animalistic and sensually connected with the environment.
As a queer and non-binary artist, facilitator, and psychotherapist, I am, passionate about exploring how creative and embodied encounters with the earth can reflect and enliven diverse qualities of being, challenging fixed identities through nature’s fluidity and continual transformation.
Publications and Research
Publication "Eco Dance Movement Psychotherapy (EDMP) and Queer Embodied Kinship with the More-Than-Human World" in 2023 explore the intersections of artistic expression, mental health, and queer ecology. These works reflect my commitment to developing new pathways for healing and connection through the integration of movement practices, ecology, and queer identity https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17432979.2023.2256373