Embodied Drawing with the Forest

Abstract

This article investigates how drawing, as a sensory and embodied practice, emerges through explorative engagement with materials and the forest, and how temporal and environmental forces become part of both experience and process. Over 1.5 years, the artist repeatedly returned to a specific forest site to create large-scale charcoal drawings in dialogue with snow, wind, rain, and warm summer days. The practice evolved from a desire for connection and as a response to digital fatigue—a longing to engage hands, body, and materials. Situated within an arts-based research methodology, the study draws on ideas from sensory ethnography and employs thick description, video and photographic documentation, and 25 large-scale drawings. Grounded in theories of embodiment, it understands the “knowing body” as deeply interwoven with materials, environments, and the materiality of the world. The findings are discussed through three themes: (1) creating connections through drawing; (2) temporality and rhythm; and (3) the poetic and multisensory dimensions of drawing with the forest. Through the material flow of charcoal, the fragility of paper, and the forest’s textures, rhythms, and changing conditions, drawing becomes a way of forming situated, meaningful connections with the surroundings and of experiencing the world differently. Each drawing expresses traces of these encounters, poetic and embodied responses to the forest’s rhythms, fragility, and impermanence, pointing toward a way of knowing grounded in slowness, attentiveness, and the making of connections with one’s surroundings through drawing.