This article was featured in the May 2025 Issue of ECO, the quarterly magazine produced by Hull and East Riding Friends of the Earth.
ReWilding Practice 2025 is a one-year postgraduate-level programme offered by Feral Art School that encourages artists to connect with industry – in this case local papermakers GF Smith and supported by Hull City Council, G.F. Smith, Arts Council England and others – and explore new ways of working.
Paper, process and sustainability have been starting points for the nine inaugural artists, who – through diverse media including paper, painting, ceramics, word, textiles and more – will be showcasing their work in a culminary celebration of the programme within the Unfolded exhibition, at the University of Hull across May and June 2025.
Our Arts Lead, professional freelance artist Lauren Saunders, is one of these artists, and will be exhibiting an ambitious and ‘magical’ mixed media installation that explores how fantastical and participatory storytelling can help people to develop nature connection and kinship with our more-than-human communities.
Alongside inviting ECO readers to explore the upcoming exhibition of diverse work at the University of Hull, Lauren reflects on the the thorny meaning of ‘rewild’ and what it means to her in the context of her art practice.
“I came to the programme fairly soon after completing my MA in Creative Practice, where my research focused on how nature connection and kinship can be developed through art, with the aim of motivating people towards meaningful climate action. I’m interested in how creativity enables people to care more about our environment and the expanded community who live alongside us within it.
The ReWilding Practice programme was helpful as a framework in which to continue my thinking on creative activism, human:more-than-human relationships and how to weave in my climate concerns as a professional freelancer trying to integrate more regenerative thinking throughout my practice.
However, a thing that niggled me right from the off, was the word ‘wild’. And by extension ‘ReWild’. And along the same lines, the word ‘feral’ bothers me too. But the more I tried to ignore my discomfort with these words… the more it niggled! I feel deep down that the linguistic baggage we have with ‘wild’ and ‘rewild’ are paradoxical and prohibitive to what we hope from a more regenerative future.
Let me explain.
It’s very simple to track anti-nature tendencies throughout (Western) history, and many believe it began with religious Abrahamic teaching (i.e. God-given dominion over nature and the intangible soul being closer to God than ‘sinful’ material existence’). There’s lots of literature out there attesting to this, and I’ve spent many an hour pouring over them. However, I instinctively feel this initial jolt of nature disconnection was earlier, and was actually from the moment we started building domestic walls that served to separate humans from the wider ecosystem. I’m not talking about creating walls for safety and warmth (akin to a nest or sett) but creating walls that meant ‘in here’ was civilised whilst ‘out there’ became uncivilised – or wild.
Yes, the ‘wild’ were cautiously permitted within our walls – through manicured gardens, caged animals, the timber that built our houses and romanticised ideals and tales of the Land. But, fundamentally and without dispute, the ‘untamed’ face of nature into something to fear, something to other, something to control and, finally, something to exploit.
Sadly, lumped in with the wild, uncivilised other came “savage” indigenous communities, the lower classes, the foreigners, the mad and disabled, the village idiot, the witches, the dissenters and whoever else held ideas or whose mere existence rocked the established status quo of those ‘civilised’ people living within the safe, walled inner sanctum of society. Ah, yes, and women. Women. Women who were not any of the above were permitted within the walls – but only when controlled because yes, world over, there is a deep, symbolic association between wildness and women too.
All of these people – for no fault of their own – were derided, exploited and/or abused for their difference to those in power within these walls.
Thankfully, great strides have been made in recent centuries on a global scale to acknowledge and address social injustices through reparations, decolonisation and equitable practice. Although I will defend the fact that there is still a very long way to go (especially now as it seems populism is hellbent on dragging us backwards…), I think it’s fair to say that we have got past the point where people are not seriously considered ‘wild’ in the colonial ‘barbaric and uncivilised’ sense anymore.
Yet even the most progressive minds within the dominant Western culture do not extend this equitable thinking to the Earth and the other Beings living within it. Why? Are we not essentially all part of the same community? The same ecosystem? This baffles me on both an intellectual and spiritual level.
I find the huge, continued systemic disconnection between our dominant species and the rest of nature really unsettling, and frankly, pisses me off on the daily. The ‘othering’ of nature – to which second-class citizens could then be associated – became compounded over time through the sequential dominance of: 1. organised religion; 2. the printing press (traditional ecological knowledge not being passed on due to the loss of oral tradition); 3. the Scientific Revolution (systematic deconstruction and categorisation); 4. Industrialisation (mass planetary exploitation) and; 5.Capitalism (unsustainable consumption and waste production).
We all know that language is culturally and behaviourally significant in terms of how we relate to the world and one another. Although the concept has been incredibly romanticised – especially in recent discourse – I fear that the word ‘Wild’ fundamentally continues to reinforce the Cartesian, dualistic fallacy that humans are separate higher beings in contrast to the ‘savagery’ of nature. Sure, we have difference to wolves, but no more difference than wolves do to trees, or trees do to volcanoes. Why do we talk like our differences make us superior?
The entire English language is so entrenched in our hierarchical othering of nature that I find it suffocating. I regularly get annoyed with myself about how often I use the word ‘nature’ to refer to an ecosystem that doesn’t include humans – but we don’t have accurate phraseology to articulate our oneness with one another. And you come off as a self-righteous, preachy **** when you use the best phrases we have at the minute – such as ‘more-than-human’ or ‘other-than-human’ – because unlike some other indigenous cultures – they’re so far removed conceptually from our everyday language that it sounds pretenrious and – for lack of a better word – unnatural.
But, we can only use the language and well-meaning intentions we have, and come up with the romantic notion of Re-wilding ourselves to become ‘one with nature’. Yet even that’s paradoxical to our language. If we humans are outside the ‘wild’, then to go ‘into the wild’ to be rewilded does not make sense.
Logically our mere presence in the ‘wild’ means that the ‘wild’ can no longer be ‘wild’, since the only logical place where humans can be is where the wild is NOT. “Aha!”, I hear you say, “but if we ‘rewild’ ourselves in an equitable acknowledgement that we are not separate to nature, surely that makes sense”. Well, no, sadly, because that still renders ‘wild’ meaningless as ‘wild’ is the word that categorises us as different from our expanded community. Point being, pedantically picking apart language like this exposes how our broken relationship with ‘nature’ (there’s that word again!) is reflected and compounded by a language built upon ingrained shaky, self-important and anthropocentric beliefs.
It’s all very frustrating, complex and nuanced… but I argue that there is a way to make this word relevant and meaningful in contemporary Westernised society. I believe the answer is to reposition our meaning of the word ‘rewild’ so that it becomes rooted in environmental decolonisation and active reparation instead.
By that I mean acknowledging that the only real difference between our species and ‘nature’ is that we (meaning those living within the dominant Western framework) are the ones who have extracted and destabilised the planetary balance in a way that no other species has. I am not stating that humans are a destructive ‘virus’ and the Earth is better off without us; not only because many global communities with alternate cosmologies have successfully lived in balance with the more-than-human world for millennia, but because our species possesses the ability and means to imagine and do better.
I therefore propose that ‘rewilding’ should be about acknowledging our collective impact and damage, taking restorative and regenerative action, giving agency back to the Land and then actually making continued efforts to ‘hear’ what it has to say.
This is how I’m choosing to frame my work within Unfolded, itself an exhibition about ‘ReWilding Practice’. My installation, titled ‘Wild Dialogue’ is a creative translation of this new meaning, and is about providing story-full routes in for audiences to imagine and do better for our more-than-human communities despite living in a society where the 1% profits from their exploitation instead.
The Project
The interdisciplinary project that I’m exhibiting within Unfolded is loosely site-specific to a green space in West Hull, and made in response to the difficulties that I have encountered when creatively promoting nature kinship within local (human) communities. I have learnt through experience of trying to put my research into practice is that before successful nature kinship development is the need for nature connection… but thanks to our bio-phobic culture that unfortunately doesn’t always come easily to people. Emergent barriers from both children and adults have includes a fear of the outdoors (i.e. the unknown), lack of interest or knowledge, feeling ‘silly’ or self-judgemental about spiritual connection, or having an instrumentalist viewpoint on nature. Through theatrical suspension of disbelief, familiar archetypes, original lore – and just a touch of magic – Wild Dialogue uses playful and participatory storytelling to offer an inspiring, low-stakes and enjoyable way to (re)learn about place, nature and British indigenous approaches to Land connection.
Every piece within this installation is dripping with storied symbolism, and, as many hands have contributed to this work, their hearts have also contributed to the magic it stores. As such, Wild Dialogue is both an invitation and a container – a space where nature connection can be rekindled through story, symbolism, and shared ritual. It is not a prescription, but a possibility: a reminder that kinship with the more-than-human world is not something to be taught, but something to be remembered.
Exhibition Details
The Unfolded exhibition showcases the exciting and diverse work of the Feral ReWilders; Jessie Davies, Faith Foster, Linda Martin, Sam Metz, Jay Moy, Dionne Ruffy, Lauren Saunders, Teddy Lucine and Sue White.
Hosted at the Brynmor Jones Library Gallery at the University of Hull between 16th May and 29th June 2025, Unfolded invites you to experience how these artists engage with themes of nature, place, paper and more.
l Fri 16 May – Sun 29 June
l Monday to Friday | 10am – 5pm | For weekend opening times contact @feral.rewilders on Instagram or call 01482 466581
l Brynmor Jones Library Gallery, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX
l Plus join us between 5pm and 7pm on Thursday 15th May to be the first to explore this innovative collection of work from nine talented local artists.
l There will also be an associated Book Launch at the gallery on 26 June.