about ecology of being

Katrine Henderson and NallaRuer lead the artist connective that is Ecology of Being. They are also the originators of the whole project.

They view Ecology of Being as an expression of the outerior connective reality of nature and the accumulation of the learning and knowledge they have acquired from our Earthland. The ancient story of humans in nature and their interwoven relationships with other beings in nature provides the paradigm and context for the development and streaming of their work.

They see the vast web of intercommunication and inter-connection that flows through all of our Earthland as the greater intelligence of nature that bonds all aspects of life in mutuality and reciprocity. The state of being that the vast majority of modern humans have now separated themselves from.

Profile of Katrine Henderson

Katrine was born and spent her childhood in Scotland’s rural Eastern Borderlands and was educated in both Scottish and English schools. She has an educational background in languages, theatre and teaching with specific training in ‘outdoor experiential education’. She studied languages at the University of Bradford in England and completed a B.Ed at Queens University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

She has been involved in the developing artist collaboration that is Ecology of Being, for a decade and a half. This has included the facilitation of ecological narratives, website design, exhibitions and curation, digital image-story-making and nature photography.

Katrine describes her conscious connection to a deeper relationship with nature as having its beginnings whilst staying on her family farm in Norway during her childhood summers. She describes her facilitators as elders of her extended Norwegian family who themselves held deep bonds with the Norwegian forest Earthland and shared this with her. This helped her to view nature as a set of personal visceral relationships. She particularly made a long-standing connection with the insect world; this formed the foundations of how she experiences nature, from the small world, i.e. making sure the wasps in her garden have drinking water accessible to everything else.

The Oslofjord and its nature played a significant role in shaping her ecological identity. A stand-out experience for her was an encounter with the natural phenomenon of bioluminescence in the form of algal blooms during a ‘nattebad’ night-swimming in the Oslofjord late August. The water was seemingly electrified. Her father, a former marine biologist explained to her that the plankton only emit the light when they are disturbed or touched by something, in this case it was her hand that set off their amazing light show all around her. This in turn electrified her connection with nature and helped to form a long-lasting bond and deep respect for all nature.

She describes her strengths as walking in reciprocal sentience within nature, having a natural reverence for other beings in nature and being able to see and connect with nature that is mostly not seen or over-looked. This is matched by her ability to intuit the meaning and personal relevance of the stories, animals and images that appear to her in her dreaming life. This is balanced by her passion for her female identity and her anger towards misogyny, injustice, inauthenticity and abuse of power. She is committed to making a positive contribution to restoring balance in our human relationship within our Earthland; by changing human attitudes to nature, thereby diminishing human destruction and depletion of nature whilst simultaneously restoring nature to its rightful place of deep respect and vital influence. She’s equally committed to restoring the dynamic feminine spectrum across our species.

Profile of NallaRuer

NallaRuer is a visual artist and co-founder of ''Ecology of Being'', a platform that facilitates psycho-ecological development through a community and ''Learning Pathway'' programmes. He has been working as a visual artist for twenty-five years, producing painted ''Image Stories'', he describes this work as ''Initiatory Art''. Ecology of Being is an outreach of the ecological knowledge and the parallel responsibilities that emerge from this work. 

His first seven years of life were spent in the post-industrial and post-second world war, central Manchester, England. The area where he lived had been severely bombed during what was called 'The Blitz' - the name is a shortened form of the Blitzkrieg to describe the German bombing campaign. His environment was one of highly toxic rivers and canals and a near complete absence of any flora and fauna. His early school environment was Victorian in its outlook, with corporal punishment and other violence integrated into the school system. From his very early years at school he began to resist the punitive behaviours of teachers, this contributed to his growing feelings of alienation toward the content and context of how he was taught. Even in these early years he understood his need for a different way of learning. He couldn't connect with the schools methods of teaching but in the process of comprehending this he gradually built mental resilience and personal validation that helped him navigate the educational system. Overtime this enabled a confidence in himself and his ability to find his own way and to define intelligence and achievement aligned with his own abilities and needs. This allowed him to sustain an independence of mind.

Eventually his family moved into the suburbs of Manchester where there were trees and parks and also different schools. these schools had the same educational system and the same problems. nevertheless, at the age of 13 he joined a mountaineering group established by a P.E teacher and was able to immerse himself in climbing, walking, caving and orienteering. This fit perfectly with his desire for outdoor experiential learning and a sense of connection. He was exposed to the mountain and hill environments of the  Peak District and Northern Fells of England, the Cairngorms and Arran Hills of Scotland and the Eryri (Snowdonia) mountains in North Wales. This opened him to austere, beautiful, isolated and expansive worlds, utterly different to his urban life, this laid down the foundations of a life-long walking and communing relationship within nature.

After finishing school he completed a foundational training in Fine Art at Rochdale College of Art and Design in England. He says he had a fractious relationship with the teaching staff because he resisted any direction in how he made his own art. By the time he had completed the course he had reached his limit for institutional education. He then formed a plan to undertake a world trip as an alternative education, eventually visiting twenty countries across five continents over a period of three years.

The world has changed a lot since his travels but he describes some of the highlights of this trip as: Travelling in the Southern Iranian desert against all good advice and then crossing the arid desert and mountain landscape of Balochistan, part of this journey on a Baloch rebel-held train;  Accompanying a Sikh family who invited him to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar in the Punjab, a pre-eminent spiritual gurdwara of Sikhism ; Visiting the white marble mausoleum, the Taj Mahal on the Yamuna river in Agra; Witnessing extensive severe poverty and people dying, literally in the gutter in Kerala, Southern India, ''an utterly shocking experience'', later a diametrically different experience while still in Kerala he walked the beautiful Montane forest in the Nilgiri Mountains; Meeting working elephants at dawn in Kandy in central Sri Lanka; Crossing the Indian Ocean by boat and hitting a ferocious storm that nearly sank the ship; Working with children and young people living with severe and terminal physical disabilities in Perth, Western Australia, ''they gave a full on education in tenacity, endurance and anti-discriminatory practice''; Walking across part of the Nullarbor Plain with a female aboriginal guide and meeting Racehorse Goanna, ''a powerful education in valuing the Earth'' ; Riding horse back in the central highlands of the Andes in Peru with mountain rangers and seeing soaring Condors, ''an utterly austere and breath-taking experience''; Crossing Lake Titicaca on the mountainous border of Peru and Bolivia; Walking in the forests of Southern Quebec Canada meeting Humming birds, Wild Turkeys, Coyote and Vultures.

After his travels he worked in a number of jobs including as a chef, taxi driver, baker, youth leader, carpenter and furniture-maker and as a social worker. He had a developing strong interest in psychological development, this led to him establishing a platform to eventually become a therapist. He decided to undertake an Advanced training in Rogerian Humanistic Psychotherapy which included training in psychodrama and expressive arts. He then backed this up by completing Social Policy and Social Work study at the University of Manchester, England.  He completed Post-graduate Psychoanalytic studies of children in the psychology department at the University of Leeds, England. He then undertook a specialist training in ''Intergenerational Trauma'' and also qualified as a ''Clinical Supervisor'' with the British Association of Psychology.

This culminated in him working as a community-based Psychotherapist with NGOs and in Statutory Child Protection Services. He specialised in establishing projects from scratch working in some of the most challenged social environments in England and Wales. He established a highly successful ''Play Therapy'' service using Virginia Axlines's work as a therapeutic model. He was also influenced by the ''Sand-Play Therapy'' model used by Jungian Therapist Dora Kalff.  He saw his work as including the role of advocate for his client children and their families who were nearly always overwhelmed by the multiple statutory services intervening in their lives. He saw many of the Statutory interventions as alienating and often compounding the lived experience of mental illness, trauma, abuse and social depravation of his client base.  This work meant he often led cases in the Family courts as well as being called into court as a specialist witness. He has since completed a training in Ecopsychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Within the 25 years that he has worked as an artist, for ten of those years he worked both as a therapist and an artist. Currently he works both as a visual artist and as a Project Leader and Facilitator for Ecology of Being. Since before his early travels, he had always intended to become a visual artist. He saw his journey through all his lived experiences in work and travel as being not only of value in themselves but as preparation for the work he does today. 

NallaRuer now lives in Scotland and has close access to walks on a major salmon river and its outlying woodland environments. The whole area is overlooked by a whaleback mountain the remnant of a 400 million-year-old volcanic range, for him this is a sacred personhood.

Scotland like its neighbour England, is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world but it also has a unique opportunity, particularly because of its geographic location and nature resources to change its relationship with nature. He is also acutely aware of the colonial and imperial legacy of the lands where he was born and now lives. This legacy includes the vicious enslavement of millions of African persons for capital gain and the worldwide destruction of indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands. This legacy continues to inflict and reinforce depravation, inequality and racism for many of these peoples descendants and to this day proper reparations are being continually denied. He sees the huge suffering of many of the human population across the world and the accelerating destruction of the more-than-human world as intimately entwined.

the work of katrine henderson and nallaruer and the project of ecology of being is a contribution to challenging and changing the direction of human development and establishing depth ecological consciousness as the modus operandi for present and future generations.

To see a selection of the artworks of NallaRuer please connect with NallaRuer.earth here.