A Beginning

Setting out on the Substack path

A very warm welcome to Wayfinding: Creative Practice as Care for Life.

Here you will find reflections on creative practice that has care at its core; care for all of life.

Image by Louisa Chase: Birch Nest from Dalby Forest Residency March 2025.

In times of rapid change, disintegration and upheaval, I will be including resources, practices, research, and general musings on the role of creative practice in these times.

At the core of my inquiry and writing is my own ongoing creative practice - a practice that has evolved over more than five decades through my nomadic and eclectic background; under-graduate studies in geography, a decade of work in community ecological restoration and conservation, motherhood, two decades of study in western healing modalities - psychotherapy, western herbal medicine, remnants of European indigenous knowledge, and immersion in systems of healing taught by medicine people from diverse traditions, both in the UK and Aotearoa. And perhaps most significantly, eighteen years spent living and travelling in Aotearoa, learning with the dynamic land there. This has had a profound impact on every aspect of my life.

At this point, five years after an unexpected change of direction via art school, it is learning outdoors directly with land and more-than-human kin that grounds, informs and strongly guides my practice.

Image by Louisa Chase: working with birch during Dalby Forest Residency 2025

All posts will be publicly available to everyone, in recognition of the fact that for many (myself included), paywalls are an obstacle. You are welcome here whether or not you become a paid subscriber. There are many ways to support my work: sharing the posts that speak to you is one of them.

If you are inspired by what you find here and you do have the resources to become a paid subscriber, this supports me to continue my work, and is a huge help.

It is important to me to remain as independent as possible from the agendas of funding bodies, and to keep as much time available as possible for practice, research, writing and reflection, as opposed to the hours upon hours that it takes to continually apply for short-term funding.

As Mitch Speed succinctly puts it in his article Notes on the Control of Society Through Art and Culture in ArtReview (7th Nov 2023),

“The difficult truth is that a better artworld will likely never exist until neoliberal capitalism is itself brought to an end. In the face of this dilemma, the most sensible course of action would be to abandon the artworld in its current form, and instead dedicate ourselves to the creation of a new one in which the means of creativity and dignity are decoupled from socioeconomic power. Painful though it is to write such a conclusion, I can’t see any other way to build an artworld worthy of the name”.

You can find out more about my practice on my website louisachase.com where you will find information about recent projects, images and CV.

Thankyou for being here, and thankyou for reading.

Warmest wishes,

Louisa

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