Kinetic Entanglements: Exploring Ecological Awareness Through Somatic Practice / Cat Jones (2025)

This practice-led research adventures with the kinetic entanglement of somatics, ecology, and language. Guided by a central inquiry in the role of mover-researcher, I question how movement practices, language, and ecology co-exist in ways that are both experientially embodied and ecologically informed. Rooted in an immersive movement practice, this project seeks to unearth how language that emerges through and lives in the body, can deepen ecological awareness and cultivate an embodied, sensuous relationship with nature. Phenomenology and somatic lineages such as Bartenieff Fundamentals and Skinner Releasing Technique underpinned creative approaches to writing, touch and voice work, offering a methodology to explore the porous boundary between inner and outer environments. The research embraces the tensions that arise at the intersection of somatics and ecological thought, not to resolve them, but to inhabit them as sites of response-ability. Porosity emerges as a key concept, not just as a condition of the body or the landscape, but as a mode of being, receptive and radically attuned to the vitality of place. Similarly, the notion of a Geography of Care, is a concept that frames local greenspace movement practice as a means of cultivating attentiveness, reciprocity, and ecological responsiveness. The project was articulated through a series of research landmarks, traces or sites of visibility that made tangible the processes of sensing, thinking, and imagining. These landmarks, made from natural materials, aimed to illuminate the embodied dimensions of inquiry and culminated in a 20-minute installation. Overall, this work contributes to the expanding field of embodied environmental education by proposing a model of ecologically engaged research that is imaginative, situated, and regenerative. It invites a shift from product to process, from individual inquiry to collective care, and from linear outcomes to cyclical, evolving modes of knowing.