about ecology of being

Katrine Henderson and NallaRuer are an artist connective and co-founders of the online learning platform Ecology of Being.

They view Ecology of Being as an extension of their artwork project and the whole of their work as an expression of the outerior connective reality of nature. Their foundational driver is the accumulated learning and knowledge they have acquired from their attuned relationships with the more-than-human world. 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 dissemination 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. 

NallaRuer was born into the post-industrial and post second world war damaged central Manchester, England. The area where he lived for the early years of his life had been severely bombed during what was called 'The Blitz' - the name is a shortened form of Blitzkrieg to describe the intense German bombing campaign over Britain. This meant large areas around his home were a wasteland covered by cinder ''crofts'', coupled with its industrial legacy this created an environment of highly toxic rivers and canals and a near complete absence of any flora and fauna. Manchester was one of the first and most industrialised cities in the world and the core driver of its development was Trans-Atlantic Slavery. His early school environment was a stark reflection of all this surrounding damage, with its Victorian outlook including corporal punishment and other violence integrated into the school system. From his very early years at school he resisted these embedded punitive behaviours and the accompanying rigid attitudes to learning. He survived by rejecting any reliance on the school system and instead went about building a mental and learning resilience that relied on his own personal experience and resources. This proved to be a powerful formative developmental journey and emerged into a very particular long-lasting approach to learning and education.

Eventually his family moved into the suburbs of Manchester where there were trees and parks and at the age of 13 he joined a mountaineering group established by a PE teacher and was able to immerse himself in climbing, walking, caving and orienteering. This fit perfectly with his desire for the outdoors and exposed him 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 with nature.

He says he developed an uncanny conviction in his late adolescence that he would become a visual artist and after finishing school he undertook a foundational training in fine art at Rochdale College of Art and Design in England. He then established a studio, however he soon began to realise that he needed other developmental experience if he was to undertake the work for which he had a powerful intuition. He eventually decided to embark on a world trip as a first step to further this quest that would see him visiting twenty countries on five continents. What he did not appreciate at the time was the scale of the task he had set himself and the long labyrinthine journey that lay before him.

The world has changed a lot since his first 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 province of Balochistan, part of this journey on a Baloch rebel-held train; Accompanying a Sikh family he was staying with to 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 extreme poverty and disease and people dying, literally, in the gutter in Kerala, Southern India, an experience he describes as overwhelming and later a diametrically different experience while still in Kerala, he walked the beautiful Montane Forest in the Nilgiri Mountains; Meeting working elephants crossing a river at dawn in Kandy in central Sri Lanka; Crossing the Indian Ocean and hitting a ferocious storm that nearly sank the ship he was on; Working with children and young people living with severe and terminal physical disabilities in Perth, Western Australia and receiving a full-on education in tenacity, endurance and anti-discriminatory practice - plus he had a lot of fun. Encountering profound racism across Australian society towards aboriginal peoples and their culture.  Walking across part of the Nullarbor Plain with a female aboriginal guide and meeting Racehorse Goanna; 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''; Meeting indigenous Quechua peoples and 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.

He has worked in a number of jobs including as a construction worker, chef, taxi driver, baker, youth leader, carpenter, furniture-maker and social worker. He later undertook an Advanced training in Rogerian Humanistic Psychotherapy including training in Psychodrama and Expressive Arts. He continued his formal higher education studying Social Policy and Social Work 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. He has since completed a training in Ecopsychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, California.

He worked as a community-based Psychotherapist with NGOs and in Statutory Child Protection Services. He held roles as Play Therapist, Counsellor, Service Manager and Project Director, specialising in establishing and leading 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.

During a ten year period, while practicing as a therapist, he undertook a program of personal therapy. this included both Jungian and Freudian Analysis, both of these were short-lived because of strong disagreements over the power imbalance in the relationship that he felt was completely unacceptable. He undertook two years in Jungian Sand Play Therapy and cites this as providing deep psychic insight that was instrumental in understanding psycho-ecological structural aspects in his later art practice. He went on to work with a Gestalt Therapist, Rogerian Therapist, a Psychodynamic Therapist and a Voice and Movement Therapist. He cites work with the Gestalt therapist as being the most personally useful and the Voice and Movement work to be the most challenging as well as the most fun. This decade of work gave him very useful working perspective across therapeutic disciplines as well providing him with much needed personal and professional balance while immersed in complex therapeutic and leadership work.

During the 25 years that he has worked as an artist, for ten of those years he also worked as a therapist. Currently he works both as a visual artist and as a project leader and teacher for Ecology of Being, a project he co-founded. Because of his early conviction that he would become a visual artist, he always saw his journey through all his lived experiences in work, travel and personal life as also a preparation for the artwork and psycho-ecological work he does today. 

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

Scotland, like its neighbours 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 remaining 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, their cultures and lives 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; establishing depth ecological consciousness and a deep understanding of the sacredness of our Earthland as the modus operandi for present and future generations.

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