“To return to a place” is decolonising work in practice

Writer Evie Muir reflects on how an artistic woodland ‘walkshop’ helped forge a connection with nature at a mycorrhizal level and sparked conversations around community care

Somewhere you can feel at home

The message we often receive from outdoors organisations is that a successful experience in nature is one where you have travelled far, high, and fast. You traverse the country or the world, have ‘summited’ a mountain (or three), ticked it off your bucket list, beat a personal best, challenged yourself, competed and won: a colonial mentality that positions the land as something to conquer. This not only positions our relationship to nature as something to own, use or take from, it removes any possibility of building a relationship with place, and appreciating the pockets of wilderness on our doorstep. 

Often, the message we receive from outdoors organisations is that a successful experience in nature is one where you have travelled far, high, and fast

To return to a place — somewhere local, somewhere you can feel at home in, and spend intentional time getting to know the contours of a river bank, the evolution of lichen on the bark of an oak, or the way the inhabiting of insects changes with the seasons. This intimacy, rather than extraction, is decolonising work in practice and was at the heart of the final Peaks of Colour x Right to Roam walkshop: Reimagining Fugitive Futures.

Ecclesall labyrinth

I’ve never been to Ecclesall Woods and not gotten lost. A labyrinth of elm and birch trees, this maze which sits amongst the suburbs of Sheffield turns a woodland into a vortex that engulfs you. I often wonder if it’s the ability of these towering trees to make you and your worldly problems feel so small that disorients you. 

Something about Eccy woods however, urges you to have faith that everything will be okay

I find I’m immediately distracted by a renewed sense of clarity, one that makes me focus on remedying whatever problem or anxiety I’m experiencing, rather than the footpath ahead. When I return my attention to my surroundings, I’m surprised by how far I’ve walked, or where I’ve ended up — somewhere raised amongst the twisting birch trees, or low, wandering amongst the depth of the stream. 

At first I was apprehensive about leading a Peaks of Colour walkshop in a place which completely annihilates my sense of bearings — a community member and I even got lost during the recce the week before. Something about Eccy woods however, urges you to have faith that everything will be okay, and that is exactly what materialised that sunny autumn morning as we gathered in the car park at the entrance of the woods. We had come together to take part in the Peaks of Colour x Right to Roam walkshop of the year: Reimagining Fugitive Futures.

Under our feet

That morning we did find ourselves lost, and not only in the geographical sense. We were lost in thought, lost in emotion, lost in the wisdom of each other and of the woodland. The group was preoccupied by birch polypore and its antibacterial properties, puffballs and their pixie dust-like spores. We encountered wood hedgehog, an earthy scented edible — appropriately named due to their spiky undercarriage — and the communicative power of artist bracken, whose spongey caps were once used as a canvas for artists and writers. 

These fungi wonders were introduced to us by Maymana Arefin, member of Misery Medicine and founder of Fungi Futures. On a foraging walk, Maymana introduced us to the ways mycelium and fungi can offer us metaphors for healing, and a reciprocal relationship with nature. 

During this part of the walkshop, I marvelled at Maymana’s ability to pause time. They started the day by initiating a silent walk, designed to ground our sensory awareness in time and place. Alongside allowing us to meditate on how we were showing up in the space, it encouraged the collective ability to attune our attention to the micro, to notice the intricacies and details of the woodland floor. We became increasingly engrossed, sharing our newfound knowledge and excitement, unable to take more than a few steps before we’d unearth something new with an excited squeal.

Attention and conversation

In our distraction at what was underfoot, we found that in the space of an hour we had travelled no distance at all, and were less than half a mile into the woodland. Had we organised a ‘normal’ walk, one where we walked with purpose from a starting point to a finishing point, looking towards the horizon or distracted in conversation with each other, this attention to detail wouldn’t have been nurtured. We wouldn’t have noticed ‘dead man’s finger’, a bewitching fungus whose latex-like exteriors wrap around a log like a hypnotising hug.

We also wouldn’t have been moved to have a conversation around community care, sparked from the noticing of slime moulds. when resourced thay stand as separate entities, but when under-resourced, they come together to share resources

We also wouldn’t have been moved to have a conversation around community care, sparked from the noticing of slime moulds, an organism made of microscopic globules which when resourced stand as separate entities, but when under-resourced, come together in order to share resources. 

As Maymana’s walkshop drew to a close, we diverted from the footpath, and waded through ivy and bramble, until we entered a clearing. Despite being moments away from the wood’s carpark, surrounded by oak, elm and chestnut, it was easy to feel hidden away from the outside world.

It was a large clearing, home to wood hedgehog which we found gnawed by slugs or squirrels, turkey tail, growing rapidly across the bark of a felled log and artist bracken, which had taken over and transformed the remnants of a fallen tree. We settled there, and as the unforecast rain began to fall, we set blankets on a carpet of fallen elm leaves. It was here, under the tree from which they fell, that we began the second part of the walkshop. 

Woodland artistry

Here, Bryony Benge-Abbot, an interdisciplinary artist who explores human-nature relationships through art making, led us in a series of creative practices, to further entrench a connection with the woodland and the fungi we’d met along the way. 

Bryony had attended the first walkshop, which explored how a connection with nature could support our processing of grief. To have a participant return in the final walkshop as facilitator felt like a harmonious synchronicity. She shared that she started building her wild drawing practice after the loss of loved ones during lockdown. She needed a simple, uncomplicated method of harnessing creativity as a coping mechanism, and here her ‘wild drawing’ practice was born. An experimental, elastic and evolving way of immersing ourselves in nature through creativity. 

To begin she grounded us in an orienting meditation that guided us to focus on the north, south, east and west parts of our bodies. With our bodies as compass, and pencil in hand, we allowed this embodied awareness to be translated to the page. Feeling more attuned to our spot in the woods, we then painted a small A6 piece of paper using soil we’d gathered along the walk and water collected from a nearby stream. 

While that was drying, we put pencil to a larger piece of paper. Bryony directed us to close our eyes, and trace contours of our face with one hand, whilst line drawing with our eyes closed. This was to be our self portrait. Then we closed our eyes again, and through mark-making exercises, we drew symbols, squiggles, or shaded areas to represent the sounds we heard around us. A self portrait situated in the sensory offerings of the woodland.

Fixated on funghi

Bryony asked us to find a fungi that interested us, and fixate upon it. Without taking our pencil off the page we were to create a line drawing of this fungi, paying attention to all the intricacies one might miss with a passing glance. I chose a galleria. Miniscule and easily overlooked, the felled logs in the clearing were bursting with their brown, buttoned cups, emerging from crevices and moss with curled cream stems.

I let my gaze fall on one in particular, and despite being surrounded by a cluster of fungi kin, drew the ways its seemingly smooth exterior puckered under the midday sun. Maymana then read a poem which she’d written about the inner workings of the mycelium networks and Bryony instructed us to move our pencil with our breath as they spoke, creating loops across the page that would depict the environment that surrounded our chosen mushroom.  

We split into two groups. One group was given a long roll of parchment paper, which lay across the mulchy floor, blue ink, and instructed to make a group piece. “Consider,” Bryony said, “what the mycelium networks look like below the ground that we’re sitting on, create that image by working together and connecting your interpretations.” 

Some of us used foraged conker shells or fallen leaves as stamps, some splattered ink across the page to represent buds. Some used sticks to make swirling patterns, and some got intimate with the ink, using their fingers to manifest the creatures burrowed underground.  “I think there’s definitely a badger under us”, I heard Nadia say from across the page, and she got to work creating our more-than-human kin. 

The second group were given mirrors and magnifying glasses, an array of colourful inks, plastic pieces of paper and white chalk pens. The inks were to be used to create a collage of colours as our backdrop and the white chalk for detailing the intricacies of our chosen mushroom. 

A woodland exhibition

“Get up close and personal with the fungi of your choice” Bryony advised, “use the mirrors and magnifying glasses to see it from a different perspective, and see what becomes of your work when you layer it”. 

With inky mycelium networks draped over the branch of a birch and our array of works, self portraits, and studies, arranged across the forest floor, together we had created our own woodland exhibition. An embodied, ecological, immersive experience which commissioned the human and more-than-human as our featured artists. 

I had been entirely lost to the world we had created here, present, yet far removed from the external realities of a not-so-post-pandemic and a cost of living crisis

As the day drew to a close, I found myself having to blink myself back to the present. I had been entirely lost to the world we had created here, present, yet far removed from the external realities of a not-so-post-pandemic and a cost of living crisis. It felt surreal, given that we had travelled no distance at all. We were still no more than ten minutes’ walk from the main road, and only a fifteen minute drive back to my own house, and yet I felt completely transported;  I’d sunk deeper into time and place, into the realm of the earth below us.  

I was struck by the enmeshing of the spaces Maymana and Bryony had co-curated. We had become intimately, messily entangled with the earth and each other. We emerged muddy, messy, soggy, covered in ink, with mud under our fingernails and twigs in our hair. Ending our series of walkshops like this felt like a homecoming.

We began this journey back in April 2023, in acknowledgement of the ways our grief and disconnect with the land were mutually destructive. In July 2023 we explored the embodied practices that could unite the liberation of the human and more-than-human. Finally, we had discarded the conditionings of white supremacy and racial capitalism that segregates us from the land, and burrowed ourselves amongst the fungi. A return to the earth.

This story is written by Evie Muir as part of a series documenting three walkshops created by Peaks of Colour and Right to Roam. Read her first story here and her second here.