Grieving with Forests: an Improvisational work toward (Re)wilding Arts Practices
Josh Wagner
Creative Practice Research PhD [ 2022 – 2026 ]
University College Cork, Department of Film, Music, and Theatre
Awarded September 6, 2026
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ABSTRACT
Grieving with Forests is an autoethnographic practice-research project investigating the perceptual and creative affordances that emerge when a grieving body sustains multi modal arts practices in minimally managed forest spaces. Rather than prioritising the production of novel artworks or the development of innovative technique, this project articulates a conceptual and methodological ecology of (re)wilding—a term used here to describe the loosening of creative and grieving practices from anthropocentric, extractivist, and prescriptive frameworks. The central research question asks how a (re)wilding of arts and grief practices can activate shifts in a practitioner’s perceptions of and relations with more-than-human ecologies.
(Re)wilding challenges dominant Western models of grief that emphasise closure, severance, and the restoration of a coherent subject. Drawing inspiration from habitat rewilding and resonant practices, theories, and methodologies, the thesis adapts core principles such as embodiment, improvisation, and interspecies collaboration toward creative and grief-affective practices. Through an articulation of ‘peripheral’ awareness as it arises in sustained practice, the project takes an ontoepistemological stance that complexity and unknowability are not obstacles to knowing, but generative conditions for relational and perceptual possibilities.
This thesis draws from ecofeminist and posthumanist thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, and Jack Halberstam to build upon Nina Lykke’s imminent materialist account of grief-related anomalous or ‘miraculous’ experience. My forest-based practice, emerging after the loss of my mother to suicide, is read through Lykke’s framework not to determine an ontology for such experiences but to examine their affective, perceptual, and transformative capacities. These encounters, whether subtle or extraordinary, are considered for their role in reorganising attention and reconfiguring the practitioner’s sense of ecological relation.
With or without the overtly ‘miraculous’, a (re)wilding of grief and creative practice can abide with bewilderment and disorientation in ways that enliven sensory attunement, deepen interspecies reciprocity, and cultivate a re-enchantment of ecological perception. The project demonstrates—through analysis of practice outputs and techniques—how sustained encounters with decomposition, decay, spectrality, and more-than-human species can transform aesthetic sensibility at the level of abjection, offering new perspectives on death, ecology, and creative processes.
Grieving with Forests contributes to ongoing conversations in new materialisms, grief studies, queer death, and environmental humanities. It offers contributions to conceptual, methodological, and practice-based frameworks—including a Seasons of Practice model for (re)wilding approaches to grief, creativity, interspecies research, and ecological ethics. Ultimately, the thesis argues for grief-affective practice as a mode of reconnecting humans to more-than-human worlds by dwelling within the generative potentials of rupture, bewilderment, and entangled becoming.
RESEARCH QUESTION
The following research questions structure the enquiry and guide the practice-led, autoethnographic, and theoretical components of this thesis. While these questions arose through practice rather than providing an initial blueprint, they now anchor the research in its completed form:
- How do grief-affective ruptures interact with forest-based creative practices?
- What perceptual, ecological, and relational affordances emerge through this interaction?
- How do these affordances inform or shape the articulation of (re)wilding as a practice methodology?
- In what ways might such (re)wilding processes ‘re-enchant’ or speculatively transform ecological attitudes and interspecies relational capacities in the practitioner?
- What roles do defamiliarisation, bewilderment, anomalous/miraculous perception, spectral or metonymic attunement, and processes of de-/re-subjectification play within these transformations?
METHODOLOGICAL (Process-oriented) RESEARCH OUTCOMES
(Re)wilding Principles Manifesto
(Re)wilding welcomes affect, uncertainty, and emergence into methodological process. It draws on the distinctive ethos of habitat rewilding, which differs from modernist conservationism by trusting environments to self-organise, adapt, and sustain themselves without top-down management. This manifesto extends that ethos beyond bio-habitats to human and more-than-human practices, presupposing that these principles can generate diverse, unexpected, and generative affordances across multiple interacting fields.
(Re)wilding is aimed at creating conditions of possibility for the wilding of processes and relations within and among fields of practice. Modelled on ecological rewilding, these practices support the inherent, co-evolved flows and negotiations of environments—rather than imposing predetermined structures. They recognise that such dynamics have sustained multispecies coexistence long before human extractivism disrupted them, and that similar principles can inform methods in creative, ethical, and research contexts. Finally, these principles describe an orientation rather than a guarantee; their effects remain contingent on access, ecology, the practitioner’s constraints, and the ethical demands of individual multispecies circumstances.
- (Re)wilding practices are embodied.
As ecological rewilding resists meticulous, top-down planning, (re)wilding of practice is activated through physical presence, bodily engagement, affective awareness, and direct interaction with the species, materials, and environments encountered. - (Re)wilding practices are site-specific.
Practitioners recognise that all locations, organisms, and ecologies differ. No general principle should override the intra-active particularities of a site’s dynamics, rhythms, or conditions, which shift from moment to moment and shape the practitioner’s experience. - (Re)wilding practices are improvisational.
Arising from principles rather than predetermined plans, these practices rely on responsiveness, adaptivity, and sensory attentiveness. Improvisation respects interspecies opacity and relies on the interplay of organisms and materials to yield outcomes that could not be designed in advance. - (Re)wilding practices foreground interspecies collaboration.
Practitioners approach their work with the assumption that collaboration—however asymmetrical or opaque—is nevertheless possible across species, materials, and forces. Interspecies interlocutors possess agency and affordances of their own, and may contribute to creative processes in ways not immediately legible. - (Re)wilding practices turn toward ecocentrism.
Without claiming a full escape from anthropocentrism, practitioners move toward an ecocentric orientation that acknowledges the perspectives of diverse collaborators, including influences across time. While each perspective is situated, it is co-constituted by the multispecies relations that surround it—this is the core of interspecies awareness. - (Re)wilding practices embrace complexity.
Complexity is intrinsic to ecological rewilding. Practices engaging interspecies ecologies must accept dynamic, nonlinear relations and the impossibility of complete control or predictive power. In (re)wilding, the complexity of interactivity requires responsive methods for working in uncertain, unknowable, or changing conditions. - (Re)wilding practices embrace methodiversity.
As biodiversity strengthens ecosystems, methodological diversity strengthens practice. (Re)wilding practitioners notice how methods interact, diverge, and cross-pollinate, and remain open to new methods emerging from context and encounter. - (Re)wilding practices leave space for emergence, reciprocity, and generative feedback.
Over time, new properties and patterns arise from complex interactions. Reciprocal relations and feedback loops generate surprising outcomes. The hallmark of (re)wilding practice is openness to these emergences—rather than an insistance on virtuosity, efficiency, or completion.
The Seasons of Practice Model
a) Excursion — Entering the world with openness
Excursion begins when the practitioner leaves familiar terrain—conceptual, physical, affective—to enter into a more-than-human environment without predetermined designs. It involves drift-ing, wandering, lingering, following curiosity, and allowing attention to be led by environmental shifts (light, sound, texture, movement, etc). Here, the work begins simply by showing up, moving responsively, and remaining open to encounter whatever a place might offer.
b) Encounter — Meeting something that interrupts perception
Encounter marks the moment something in the environment catches attention and unsettles habitual ways of seeing. It is a point of contact where interest is sparked or perspectives are disrupted. Whether minor or extraordinary, these moments introduce difference and open relational possibility.
c) Engagement — Staying with the encounter
Engagement involves committing to an ethical, improvisational interaction with the encountered sensation, entity, or process. This may include attentive observation, touch, listening, sound-making, following movement, relational documenting, or simply remaining with discomfort or curiosity. In this season, reciprocities emerge where the practitioner responds to the rhythms, resistances, or affordances of more-than-human collaborators.
d) Assembly — Allowing relations to shape form
Assembly refers to materials, sensations, recordings, artefacts, or energetic residue from engagements as they coalesce into creative form. This may take shape as film, installation, sound design, performance score, or something unclassifiable. Assembly does not impose order but listens for interactive opportunity, downplaying preconceived artistic agenda and allowing interspecies entanglements to shape the work. It is a season of translation, where practice ‘speaks back’ through form.
e) Decay — Letting forms fall apart
Decay recognises that not all outputs should be stabilised, preserved, or polished. Works may be allowed to decompose, return to the forest, fade, glitch, unravel, or remain iteratively ongoing and unfinished. Decay prevents practice from becoming rigid or extractive and honours the ecological reality that endings are openings—compost for future encounters and engagements.
Conditions of Possibility for Material Miraculous Encounters of Re-enchantment
(Re)wilding, as it unfolds in this thesis, is process without procedure. Rather than prioritising interpretive frameworks or fixed methodological structures, (re)wilding entangles itself in relations (Vannini, 2015:319–320). It opens to the perceptual affordances that arise from attending to the bewilderments of grief—bewilderments that feel at first impossibly painful, but which gradually make available new relational and ontological modes. As the emotional bewilderment of loss resonates with the somatic and spatiotemporal bewilderment of forest practice, conditions of possibility arise in which dissolution becomes generative. What is shed in twilight—habitual patterns, perceptual armour—is reconfigured into more porous, responsive ways of being.
Within sustained bewilderment, sensoriums destabilise and reorient. Practice settles in, and inosculation begins. A new world becomes inhabitable: not as fantasy or solace but as an altered mode of participation. Where one once perceived passively, new impulses arise to look, listen, and feel across the peripheries of attention. One enters first the imagined forest; then, as perception renews, one opens to the forest as it actually unfolds; and finally one does not conclude at all, but wanders on along the unending pathway of becoming-with the forest—a mode of life that is both possible and necessary.