Walk Beside Me: Growing an awareness of plants through art and cross-cultural perspective

Walk beside Me is a work of art resulting from a cross-cultural collaboration between Aunty Deidre Martin, a Walbunja Elder of the Yuin nation, and
Erica Seccombe, an Australian of European descent. Throughout this essay,
Aunty Deidre is acknowledged with the title, “Aunty,” the name given to highly
respected women in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who
maintain custodianship of cultural knowledge and lore according to their kinships. This collaboration as a creative practice responds to the theme of plant
blindness, a plant awareness disparity that describes the human phenomena
of an impaired recognition of plants (Wandersee and Schussler). This work
was commissioned by the 2022 Tellus Art Project, which is an alliance between
University of New South Wales Art and Design, the Sydney Royal Botanic
Gardens Herbarium, Bundanon, and Open Humanities Press. The research
of the lead investigators, Prudence Gibson and Maria Sierra, initiates interdisciplinary art projects framed by discourses in critical plant studies. In The
Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life, Gibson writes about the relationships
between plant ontologies, politics, ethics, and art, emphasising that “the art
world is a discipline that can provide an interpretation of the changed way we
understand or conceive of plants” (13).