An invitation from the Monsuous

Monsuous Ecology begins with something raw, such as a lump of wet clay slipping through the fingers, or a feeling in the gut before there are words…it is a way of moving through the world led with sensation and pulled by curiosity. It explores the forces of attraction between beings and matter, the textures, slippages and mutabilities that beckon us closer…the stickiness of contact, the stretch of softened flesh, the subtle resistance of matter to control - our environment doesn’t simply receive our touch, it presses back, far from a pristine backdrop for our endless consumption and extraction. Through deep feeling and intuitive engagement with material of the earth, it gestures towards decolonising the senses, for intimacy through sensation shapes how we understand and relate to others to foster healthy cultures.

Monsuous Ecology is a practice and a framework for confronting the monstrous and re-imagining it - not as something to be feared, but honoured as generative and vital. Through painting, poetry, material play and embodied research it asks: What do we call monstrous, and why? inviting reflection on how culture and ideology shape our sense of what is acceptable, liveable or loveable -  and in the process revealing our own internalised fears and disgust.

Monsuous Ecology is deeply rooted in interspecies empathy, and speaks to the power of hybridity, of merging the human and the non-human, challenging Western dominant views that are built on separation that perpetuate disembodiment, ecological collapse, and inherited systems of violence. There are no clean answers to the multifaceted planetary condition we currently find ourselves in, only an invitation into deep relationality. In this manner, Monsuous Ecology would like to serve as a kind of sensuous repair, a place where we hold the uncomfortable, confusing, monstrous residues of the conditions that have shaped us. Here, it dares to dream within the mess, whilst recognising inevitable short-comings, failures, and complicity within the complex narrative of modernity.