Multi-Species Making-With: Collaborating with Plant, Fungi, and Lichen in a Drawing Classroom

As an educator, wildlife biologist and artist, all of my work involves making connections with others. The act of making-with kin species rather than taking ownership of them allows for multi-species agency. In the Anthropocene, a time in which human omnipotence seems to reign supreme, making time and space for others is not only ecologically responsible, it is vital to survival. Too often teachers and artists alike maintain archaic ways of confronting nature. However, by investigating Indigenous traditional knowledge and new scientific understandings of other species, we can revitalize our practices. For myself and my students this means investigating Indigenous natural dye species as well as new scientific understandings of fiber science and plant, fungi, and lichen biochemistry and physiology. After using the ethnobotanical online database and scientific journals for their research, my students and I go into the environment, sustainably collecting plants, soil, algae, lichen, and fungi with which we collaborate and experiment. Furthermore, we work with these pigments to blur the lines between unnecessary boundaries that divide sculpture, painting, drawing, fiber art, and printmaking. Students use what they gather to naturally dye textiles and papers, to print on clothing, to sculpt with hand-made ropes and cordage. Embracing materiality and ecology over unwritten rules that separate art and craft, human and nature, we’re able to more authentically make work and introduce radical care into our practices.