“Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent.”
(Shepherd, 2021, p. 106)
I might start by introducing an influence of mine. Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) spent her entire life exploring, wandering, knowing, and then writing about the Scottish mountain range, the Cairngorms in her book, The Living Mountain. Shepherd formed a deep connection with the mountain. She gave the mountain her lifetime, and in return, the mountain gave her a lifetime of understanding and knowing oneself truly. It is worth mentioning that the nature of this connection was not only intellectual, but bodily as well. It is the body’s response to the mountain she records, the senses. Walking the ‘flesh transparent’ is not to say the body is ignored, rather “paramount” (Shepherd, 2021, p. 106). Only by engaging the senses fully might one know their natural surroundings and themselves. To know the landscape without is to know the landscape within.
I have my own mountain. My mountain is the West Woods near my home: the site and subject of my practice. I have always felt a sense of alienation from my body; a split between it and my mind. The time I spend there helps me make sense of my body, as it is through it and all the senses afforded to it, that I experience all the minor intricacies of nature’s phenomena that occurs there. More than that though, it is how I make sense of the woods: Embedding myself fully into the earth, letting the wet leaves and mud touch my skin, listening to the tapping rain as it hits them, smelling the damp earth in the air and feeling its cold in my breath. This is the language I understand. I understand myself through understanding the earth.
There is another position we might derive from Shepherd’s quote: In walking the ‘flesh transparent’ one could begin to see through the body. There is a language to touch, the eye is insufficient. When making my work in the woods, I have often said that to cover my hands would blind me. This essay collects some of my written sketches, in which I document these experiences. Through them I attempt to translate each sense in response to my surroundings. I am primarily a visual artist, but there are some crevices of the woods that only words might reach.
The Written Sketches
Private Woods
Minor Intricacies of Natural Phenomena
Earth Encase Me
Somewhere in The Middle of Me
Bones
Cruel Imagination
Beneath the Earth, River of Blood
Dragon in the Rain
Beyond the West Woods
Humans have always been embodied nature and are dependent upon it for survival. Not dependent on its extraction, but our co-existence and collaboration with nature and our own communities. In recent centuries, however, this connection has been severed. In The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant (b.1936) would point to this severance as causing the destruction and exploitation of the natural world we see today. More than that, the death of nature also refers to the death of the body and of human nature. Merchant discusses the motive and weapon of choice that capitalism, mechanism, and the Scientific Revolution used in this ‘murder’:
“A new concept of the self as a rational master of the passions housed in a machine-like body began to replace the concept of the self as an integral part of a close-knit harmony of organic parts united to the cosmos and society (…) Mechanism rendered nature effectively dead, inert, and manipulable from without.” (Merchant, 1989)
The Scientific Revolution birthed the dualist idea of mind and body as two separate aspects of human experience. Nature was associated with the body, whereas the mind, associated with the corporeal and culture, was positioned as the ruling force over the body. This idea would serve the needs of the capitalist system; as machine for labour, the body could be controlled and utilised for capital gain. In that sense, the individual would find themselves with class power systems ingrained within their own being.
As Silvia Federici (b.1942) asserts in Caliban and the Witch, “like the land, the body had to be cultivated and first of all broken up (…) The body had to die so that labour power could live” (Federici, 2021).
We can also look to ‘the father of modern science’, Francis Bacon, as another culprit. His science of domination; of conquest; that declared nature as dead matter, would justify its extraction and exploitation. A framework also used as reasoning for colonial expansion: The land as inanimate, dead matter was meant to be dominated by the will of man. Nature-culture dualism is a colonial science.
“there is no egalitarian dualism between the thinking head and the body-machine, only a master/slave relation, since the primary task of the will is to dominate the body and the natural world.” (Federici, 2021)
This is why this reattachment feels so necessary. The body is not separate to the mind but in fact interwoven with nature and how we experience it. The further we distance ourselves from nature, the further we distance ourselves from our physical body, and the easier it is to allow for the exploitation of both. Today, a capitalist patriarchal system has allowed for the fragmentation of not only land, but also ourselves, into economic resources. In that sense, a return to nature, re-establishing the ties between body and earth, is inherently political.
And now… Ecofeminism
It is worth discussing the gendered dimension to the body-nature connection. Ties between women and nature, imposed or otherwise, have always existed. The anthropomorphising of the earth/nature as a mother; ‘mother nature’, as well as the reference to nature as ‘her’, has permeated text and art throughout (at least) Western histories.
To refer to Carolyn Merchant again, she observes this use of language in connecting nature with femininity as a tool to justify the exploitation of both, using “bold sexual imagery” that “legitimates the exploitation of nature for human good” (Merchant, 1989):
“Female imagery became a tool in adapting scientific knowledge and method to a new form of human power over nature.” (Merchant, 1989)
The relevance today, of course, being the increasing violence against both women and nature. Ecofeminism, since it emerged in the 1970s, recognises this interconnectivity of ecological issues and the systematic oppression of women. It highlights the ways in which women’s bodies and nature have become seen as economic resources to be exploited and dominated under a capitalist patriarchal system. It looks at the histories of patriarchal structures imbedded in society, and how a capitalist, colonial science has led to the destruction of ecology. Ecofeminism takes the thinking of socialist and Marxist feminists towards reproductive labour and realigns them to a more eco-centrist standpoint. Sociologist and ecofeminist, Ariel Salleh writes:
“In sociological terms, the level of abstraction in our focus shifts from relations of production between capital and labour to more universally encompassing relations of reproduction between labour and nature.” (Salleh, 2017)
It feels important to note that nature’s exploitation is not just tied to sexism; racism, homophobia, and colonialism also play a part. Indeed, ecofeminism recognises this, and the Queer Ecology standpoint that in gender itself being a construct, ‘women’ encompasses both masculine and feminine sensibilities.
A capitalist patriarchal system relies upon the subjugation of both women and nature: The appropriation of reproduction and pillaging of natural resources. Ecofeminist and activist, Vandana Shiva (b.1952) observes that current production boundary does not attribute any economic value to the two economies most “vital” for human and planetary survival; “nature’s economy and the sustenance economy” (Shiva, 2014, p. xv). This disproportionally affects the global south which currently faces the highest risks of climate disasters. Ecofeminism takes a pluralist stance in its acknowledgment that different people around the globe will have differing insights on ecological issues based on their own experiences and understandings. It would reject the notion that ‘we are all in the same boat’ when it comes to environmental collapse and recognises the real ways the climate crisis affects different diasporas (MacGregor, 2020). Knowledge and understanding of the natural world cannot be defined under a singular science. In a capitalist patriarchy though, this is exactly what is happening.
“Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world can only be maintained if the powerful grab the resources of the vulnerable.” (Shiva, 2014, p. xvi)
The vulnerable being women and nature, and their exploitation being a precondition for capitalism’s existence creating a “culture of rape – rape of the earth, of logical self-reliant economies, of women” (Shiva, 2014, p. xvi).
Recognising the connection between body and nature as something to be nurtured, rather than resources to be extracted in the name of limitless capital growth, is vital if there is to be any future for humanity and the planet.
“If we continue to understand our role as rooted in the old paradigm of capitalist patriarchy – based on a mechanistic world view, an industrial, capital-centred competitive economy, and a culture of dominance, violence, war and ecological and human irresponsibility – we will witness the rapid unfolding of increasing climate catastrophe, species extinction, economic collapse, and human injustice and inequality.” (Shiva, 2014, p. xix)
Seeing Through The Body
The destruction of our natural environment cannot be ignored. The effects of climate change are becoming irreversible. My work is based around a deep love I have for a very specific part of the natural world, but the earth, my subject, encompasses the Earth as a whole.
If we begin to understand ourselves through our bodies in the natural world, and reunite the ties that bind us, we might to resuscitate the ‘dead matter’. As put by political theorist, Jane Bennett (b.1957) in Vibrant Matter:
“How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents of forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own.” (Bennett, 2012, p. 58)
I know this is not a new idea, and reiterating the point only goes so far. Ecology is just as much a class struggle as feminism, and recognising their intersectionality is crucial in how we fight for our planet. A connection to nature is important. Access to nature is important.
These thoughts are at the core of my practice. Through a unification of earth, paint and blood, my work draws upon these themes, creating parallels between the land and the body, and in the process of making them, a re-attachment to nature through the body.
Before that though, before the painting, I try to exist within those woods, to engage with its materiality, to see it through my transparent flesh.
“But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body.” (Shepherd, 2011, p. 106)
Images
All images by author. Stills from ‘Flesh Transparent’, 2026.
Cooke. N. (2026). ‘Flesh Transparent’. Available at: https://youtu.be/A8JbjwHwwck
References
Shepherd, N. (2011). The living mountain. Edinburgh: Canongate
Merchant, C. (1989). The Death of Nature. United States: Harper & Row.
Federici, S. (2021). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Great Britain, Penguin Random House.
Salleh, A. quoted from Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. (2017). ‘Ecofeminism as Politics’. 15 June. Available at: https://youtu.be/gKcS2Jc7tNs?si=W5z58SPbmjqCGZTa [Accessed: 03/11/26]
Mies, M. and Shiva, V. (2014). Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. P19-22
MacGregor, S. (2020) quoted in Ecopolitics Podscast. ‘Episode 9: Ecofeminism and Queer Ecology’. 11 Oct. Available at: https://youtu.be/oztiJFCPwxU?si=Oo_np7iPhZLHUgpm [Accessed: 02/11/26]
Bennett, J. (2012). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Kastner. J. (ed.) Documents of Contemporary Art: Nature. London: Whitechapel Gallery.
About the Author
Natasha Cooke (MA Fine Art: Painting) is an oil painter based between London and Kent, graduating from UAL in 2026. Their research finds importance in a reconnection of nature and the body. Through a unification of earth, paint and blood, their earth paintings explore these themes in representation and method.
Instagram: @natashacookefineart