Grieving with Forests: an improvisational work toward (re)wilding arts practices
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Date
2026-07-22
Authors
Wagner, Josh
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University College Cork
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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 onto- epistemological 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.
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Keywords
Grief , Grieving , Nature , Ecosystems , Posthumanism , Rewilding , Research creation , Practice research , Transdisciplinary , Forest-based , Arts practice , Interspecies , Immanent miracles , Improvisation , Embodied practice
Citation
Wagner, J. 2026. Grieving with Forests: an improvisational work toward (re)wilding arts practices. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.