NIGERIA

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Oyewole Lawal (1988) is a photographer and visual artist with a passion for storytelling. His journey into photography began in late 2020, starting with just a smartphone before transitioning to a DSLR camera in late 2021.

With a background in sociology from the University of Lagos, Oyewole’s style is influenced by sociological theories such as functionalism and Marxism. He uses his photography to critique and explore social issues, aiming to document the complexities of human experience and the evolving dynamics between individuals and their environments. By doing so, Lawal brings attention to marginalized voices and challenges stereotypes.

Currently, Oyewole is working on an environmental and social story, ‘Guardian of Gaia’, in Nigeria.

UNITED KINGDOM

Lilith Piper (b.1999). I am a fourth generation landscape painter with a deep-rooted connection to Avalon and the Somerset landscape (UK). My practice spans set design, performance art, land art, and mural painting—each grounded in a reverence for place and the environment. Live performance is central to my work; as the creative producer and programmer of the Tree Stage in Glastonbury Festival’s Woodsies area (UK).  I explore the ceremonial power of gathering in a specific place and time to share stories, foster transformation, and cultivate more attentive, reciprocal relationships with the natural world. The ways that environment holds a kind of deep time and animacy, a presence I seek to honour in my work.

UNITED KINGDOM

Riya Panwar is a visual artist and communicator based in London, specializing in alternative photography. Her work explores the chemistry of photographic materials with a focus on imperfection, aiming to reduce the use of toxic methods while innovating new approaches to visual storytelling and communication.

Riya is dedicated to sustainable practices that make art and design more accessible and less intimidating. Her work has been featured in Vogue India and Homegrown, and internationally showcased at Tokyo’s Shibuya MODI building, the Women Alternative Photography Community exhibition, and the Symbiosis II group exhibition by the London Alternative Photography Collective at Four Corners.

HOLLAND

Eva Gjaltema (1979) is a Dutch visual artist working mainly with photography, collage and mixed media and who has been living in Berlin since 2012. Her artistic work stems from a profound desire to explore and illuminate themes related to life experiences and the inner conflicts we face as human beings. She combines various archival and self-created photographic materials, removes them from their original context, and rearranges the images to unfold new meanings. She holds a Master's degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2004) and a Bachelor's degree in Photography Design from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague (2008). Currently, she is pursuing training to become an art therapist.

BRAZIL

Isabella Morales Salis is a queer Brazilian interdisciplinary artist based in London. Her practice explores themes of identity, ecological consciousness, and personal mythology through painting, installation, and narrative work. Rooted in drawing from reality and imagination, Isabella uses visual narrative as a way to witness and process lived experience—personal, political, and planetary. Her work often invites others into spaces of reflection and transformation, blending intimacy with broader social and environmental concerns.

USA

Jacqueline Maloney currently lives and works in unceded Tsalagi territory, present day North Carolina, in a studio in her off-grid home.  She chops her wood and carries her water from a spring at the feet of the Black Mountains. She has cultivated deep curiosity about the natural world since her childhood, throughout which she lived close to the sea in unceded Wabanaki territory, or present day Southern Maine.  Barefoot afternoons in pine and birch forest and meanderings through tidepools and rocky beaches nurtured an early curiosity, and also a deep sense of relationship to the world beyond the sidewalk. This curiosity has since fostered a deep concern for her species’ relationship to the nonhuman, as she sniffs out the tracks we leave behind us through an unraveling landscape.  It is this care that fuels the questions which unfold and augment her drawings and paintings. 

GHANA

Formerly pursuing a career in computer science, Aboya transitioned into photography following a deep personal loss, channeling his emotion into the visual arts. Self-taught and intuitive, his creative journey is deeply rooted in human connection and emotional truth.

Michael’s work has been featured by leading platforms including BBC, Forbes, Adobe, and National Geographic, and he was a winner of the Agora Awards 2019 for the photograph Songs of Freedom. He continues to use his art to inspire, provoke reflection, and amplify African stories on the global stage.

UK

Cheryl Aurora Silvawood started her career as a professional travel/environmental photographer and journalist based in Singapore. In 2007 she qualified as a scuba diving instructor and embarked on a professional diving and marine conservation career, as well as establishing a marine reserve on the Great Astrolabe Reef in Fiji.  Cheryl is a woodswoman, arborist and an independent trees and woodlands consultant with a speciality for ancient and veteran trees. 

She authors a blog and shares her experiences through various platforms like social media, online features, BBC Gardeners’ World, podcasts, talks and on guided walks. She holds nature inspired creative writing workshops and co-creates woodland events. Currently working part-time at the Resurgence Trust supporting Satish Kumar’s ambassadorial work, Cheryl is also a Woodland Trust Ancient Tree Inventory verifier, a trustee at the Ancient Tree Forum, a trustee at Hakeford Woods CIO, and a director of a creative arts community interest company (CIC) called Evolving Events. She is also a nature-inspired intuitive Zentangle artist (Helix Nature Art) and a professional musician (Amanita Grove).

GERMANY

I am a donor child, meaning I was conceived through an anonymous sperm donation in 1983. In Germany alone, there are around 100,000 to 125,000 donor children (also known as donor-ospring or donor-conceived persons). Because I lack knowledge of 50 percent of my biological identity, nature has always been an important companion to me. Through it, I've experienced a sense of identity and connection, and a sense of belonging to the greater whole, which is much more than just belonging to two people I call father and mother. This is also reflected in my art. Nature plays a major role in my ink drawings, as well as in my portrait photography, which I aOectionately call "human nature photography." There, I try to depict the vulnerability of humans in contact with the sensual nature. I also work as a nature process facilitator.

SRI LANKA

Crissy Fernando is a Sri Lanka-based visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice investigates the symbiotic relationship between humans and the natural environment. Informed by prehistoric symbolism, traditional Sri Lankan visual culture, and contemporary ecological concerns, her work emphasizes materiality and process. She primarily works with earth pigments, natural dyes, and soil particularly laterite-rich ochres integrating site-specific materials to explore concepts of place, memory, and embodied connection. With over a decade of self directed practice and formal training through a Foundation in Fine Arts, her work engages land-based methodologies and sensory experience to question the boundaries between nature, culture, and the self.

SOUTH AFRICA

Erin Smith is a visual artist from Gqeberha, South Africa, where she completed her master’s degree in fine art at Nelson Mandela University under the SARCHI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa. Her longstanding passion for environmentalism and conscious stewardship of the Earth led her to explore Earth-friendly artmaking techniques and materials as part of her master’s research, which resulted in a body of site-specific land art made entirely from organic materials and found objects. Through making this work, Erin was awoken to the transformative power of site-specific artmaking as a tool for reinforcing a deeper personal relationship with the wider natural world. With this as a foundation, her artistic practice continues to explore themes of interconnectivity and humans’ place in wider Nature. Outside of her work, Erin enjoys hiking, spending time with her cats, and fire dancing.

SICILLY

I am a classically trained violinist and sound practitioner with a Master’s degree in Violin and Music Performance from the Giuseppe Verdi State Conservatory in Turin. While my foundation is in classical orchestral performance, over the years, my work has evolved into a multidisciplinary artistic practice through ethnomusicological study of vibrational medicine across cultures. I explore the role of ritual in shaping sound performance as a shared, immersive, therapeutic act.

The earth’s dreams can be our dreams…..

My creative practice emerges from relationship to place
—the land and sea and their diverse rattles of life.
Pattern, mark and colour resonate, and movement guides most of what I do.

I aim to help others fall in love with the Earth, exploring and offering a variety of creative approaches & facilitated pathways to help weave wild relationships within the heart.

UNITED KINGDOM

As an artist working at the intersection of ecology, access, and material care, my practice is deeply rooted in reciprocity - a reciprocal process between land, material, maker, and audience. I engage with wild clays, gathered materials, and reclaimed textiles to create sculptural installations and environments that centre sensory experience and foster environmental awareness. My work unfolds through a collaborative dialogue with place and material, where each element responds to and shapes the other over time. This process respects the agency of natural materials and the rhythms of the landscape, embracing non-linear time and the slow unfolding of relationships. I am driven by a desire to reconnect people with the natural world through direct, tactile engagement, emphasising touch and care as modes of knowledge and connection. As a disabled and neurodivergent artist, I navigate my practice through fluctuating capacities and attentiveness to pace, which informs a patient, embodied approach to making. This attentiveness cultivates spaces where diverse modes of interaction and learning are welcomed and valued.

EGYPT / UK

Lora Aziz is a British Egyptian artist whose creative practice reimagines contemporary cross-cultural relationships with land and nature through wildcrafting, community herbalism, earth science and visual ethnobotany.

Her latest project and exhibition Motanafas: A space to connect is a UK – Egypt collaboration forming part of the British Council’s COP27 Creative Commissions that brings together art, science and digital technology as an innovative, interdisciplinary, inclusive response to climate change. Lora Aziz is an interdisciplinary artist, land-based cultural producer, and creative strategist based in Suffolk, UK. Her work weaves together ecology, memory, and storytelling through workshops, residencies, foraging walks, and community rituals. With a background in anthropology and visual ethnobotany, she explores themes of belonging, slow economies, and cultural care — from CSA farms to international climate platforms.

UNITED KINGDOM

My current research seeks to unravel the tightly woven complexities of this vast and often opaque system, examining how issues of class and environmental degradation intersect. The textile industry represents one of the most intricate and far-reaching supply chains in global manufacturing. By deconstructing and reconstructing textile waste, my work interrogates the systems at play and calls to account those responsible for perpetuating environmental harm and social injustice. As a working-class, environmentally focused artist, my practice aims to raise awareness of and inspire action against the global climate crisis. Through socially engaged methods, I create work that invites dialogue and fosters change at both community and individual levels. Using material practices to shift perspectives, I strive to develop sustainable, creative solutions that advocate for ecological preservation.

UNITED KINGDOM

For me, tackling the ecological crisis is now the only thing that matters. It is everything. It is complex. It is political. Ecological justice is social justice. There is no environmental justice without gender and racial justice, for example. This is a mycelial network of interconnecting issues that need sensitive and intersectional solutions. This is the work art needs to do. As an artist, it is important to me to be “at work in the ruins” (Dougald Hine). I am also a director and curator for Trans- States, which is a small community interest company dedicated to the scholarship of contemporary occulture and esotericism. As a result, this brings a spiritual dimension to my thinking about ecology and climate change. I am interested in the ways that esoteric thought can give us new ways to imagine and access our past, present, and future.

JAPAN

Ryhan resides in Japan and works within the agriculture sector. From farming green tea to researching food products (sea salt and spices) for her graduate studies, practising photography has provided her with a way of reconciling the paradoxical arcs of academia and art. Visual images are her method of bridging a product’s well grieved past to present day audiences.

She is also currently a PhD student at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Agriculture. Her research focuses on resource colonialism and the cultural value of heritage agriculture products. Specifically delving into the ethical spaces of food production between Indonesia, Japan, and the Netherlands. With a deep yearning to bring her findings to a wider audience, traversing between nostalgia and the allure of new memories is the fabric of Ryhan’s unapologetically human behaviour.

AOTEAROA (New Zealand)

Genevieve Rae (Pākehā Tangata Tiriti) is a facilitator and artist working with textiles, nature, community, and exploring how these interconnect. Through their Micro Mill project Genevieve highlights artists and craftspeople local to Aotearoa, through pop up events, hosting workshops, and online. The Micro Mill nurtures material webs of connection, learning, and natural ecosystems.

Multispecies philosophy guides Genevieve’s practice as they create textiles alongside spiders, bugs, fungi, and other non-human organisms. Weaving outside offers limitations and challenges that teach us to let go of the process, and let nature weave with us, guiding the way. Spiders make their own tapestries alongside Genevieve, while bugs lay eggs on the yarns, adorning them like jewels. Genevieve’s work invites a sense of connection to smaller beings in our ecosystems who are often overlooked. Smaller beings who we can often learn from, and who we can learn to honour. 

Materials move through my fingers like my cells will one day move through soil.

USA

Fauna Rasmussen is a Minnesota based stop-motion animator. She currently attends the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, majoring in animation. Her work deals with ecology and
rewilding, often specifically covering the enormous loss of mega/macrofaunal biodiversity during the two latest mass extinctions. Her most recent project is made up of short stop-motion clips with
needle felted models taking place in the late Pleistocene to early Anthropocene. She can be seen driving around Minneapolis in her art-car, named Flora.

VIETNAM / FRANCE

hamsa fae is a Vietnamese-French artist working across performance, sound, movement, and sculpture, currently working in “Turtle Island (USA).

With a decade of research in shamanism and land-based inquiry, she uses the third gender body as a site for ancestral technologies and indigenous futurity. Her practice unravels the interconnectedness between identity, intimacy, and ecology by using systems of re-matriation to challenge coloniality. Through cyber and site-specific invitations, she edges audiences towards self and environmental remembrance.

“If my body is in constant connection to both nature and the digital, may some part of me always be performing. May it disregard time while existing in the wild or interwebs. Body leaves auric imprints on trees hugged, seaweed braided. Body leaves avatar footprints for computation, social consumption. I unfold in these sensual dualities, yet find freedom in the in-between.”

UNITED KINGDOM

Facilitating meaningful engagement between ecological research and audiences through a material-centric craft approach, Sophie cultivates what she terms a land-based, ecologically restorative, and storytelling practice. Grounded in artistic inquiry, material exploration, and local contexts, her work emphasizes the significance of our personal connections to landscapes, while advocating for our role within intricate ecological systems. Drawing from her education in Design, Craft, Permaculture, and Circular systems, Sophie has developed an interdisciplinary practice centered on biodegradable, restorative, and regenerative materiality. From repurposing food waste into nurturing living soil, and from managing non-native invasive species into sculptural expression, her work spans a spectrum of creative and ecological endeavors.

MOZAMBIQUE

Born in Mozambique during a 16-year war, MoYah was forced to flee his country as a political refugee & move to Lisbon at a young age.

Inspired by his parents broad musical taste & the impact of Rap music whilst living in Portugal, he quickly learned that music could be used not only for entertainment but also as a powerful tool for self exploration & social expression eventually leading him to writing raps that addressed issues relating to identity, social injustices & spirituality from the perspective of a child of the African Diaspora.

USA

Willow is an environmental scientist, interdisciplinary artist, musician, and storyteller from endless hills and secluded forests of rural Virginia. Grounded in research, their practice includes recycled and bio-based installation art, words, music, and biosonification (turning processes within living organisms into music and sound). Willow routinely merges visual, literary, and sonic mediums to create ethereal performances across the East Coast. They often weave themes of ecology, gender, and social issues with an autobiographical exploration of nature, and feel driven to use intersections of art, science, and technology to tackle environmental and social issues. Willow loves finding objects and introducing chaos and regeneration in ways that invite us to question what we are seeing, with hopes to spark conversation around critical issues of our time and of our future.

THE HAGUE

Sabine Rovers (b. 1992) is a photographer, artist and storyteller, based in The Hague. Her work is driven by a curiosity to discover, understand and connect with the natural world around her. From an open and optimistic perspective, she looks for intimate stories that help us slow down and (re-)connect to the earth and every living thing on it. Involvement and collaboration are key in her process, she prefers to make work with her subjects, instead of about them. Ultimately, Sabine hopes to tell stories that can navigate us to a more sustainable and healthy future. If we can't see the world we want to live in, how will we get there?

UNITED KINGDOM

Combining my background in lens based art, graphic design, research, and community design, I aim to cultivate cross-cultural dialogue by facilitating spaces that hold  stories in today's current anthropocentric era.  My personal artistic practice explores themes of eco-feminism, land, ecology, and migration. Crafting visual narratives that aim to share stories that are carried over generations that exist encoded in the systems of ecologies that are embedded within.

I have worked alongside communities, clients and individuals crafting activations by integrating embodied experiences and digital stories, in order to foster deeper connection and education among participants. Using design tools such as film, graphic design, workshopping, and curation, I am passionate about facilitating these spaces for collective learning to engage the communities I work with.