Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
Societal Impact Statement: Amid escalating climate crises, this paper explores how we might rethink our relationship with the natural world, particularly with plants and trees, through the perspectives of visual art. This paper reveals how art invites us to see trees and other plant life not as passive background scenery, but as living beings with their own forms of experience and individuality. Rather than offering technical solutions to the climate crisis, visual art creates something equally important: a shift in how we think and feel about ‘othering’ non-human life. By making visible the inner lives and behaviours of plants, art can challenge the human habit of treating the natural world as a resource to be used, rather than a community of beings to live alongside. This change in perspective may become the foundation of climate resilience. Summary: Interdisciplinary plant studies have rapidly emerged in the humanities and philosophy over the past decade, reshaping our understanding of human and non-human, particularly regarding plant life, intelligence and subjectivity. While substantial scholarship exists in philosophical and humanistic approaches to plant studies, practice-led, arts-based research in plant studies remains a relatively underexplored field that merits greater attention. This paper contributes to this gap by exploring how art practices about plant subjectivity can reimagine human–non-human relationships based on sympoiesis theories. This paper uses practice-led research as its core methodology, facilitating dynamic interaction between art practice and theoretical reflection, alongside archival research method to contextualise relevant literature. This paper demonstrates that art practices centred on plant subjectivity offer a means of challenging anthropocentric frameworks, revealing new dimensions of interspecies relationality by repositioning trees and non-human life as beings with voice, agency and individuality rather than as objects. True anti-anthropocentrism requires rejecting both human-exclusive subjectivity and the erasure of individuality in non-human beings. By inviting humans to re-experience time and space through the grammar of non-human life, art offers not a definitive solution, but a more expansive and ethically grounded cognitive perspective on multispecies coexistence.
Keywords
arboreal visual art practices, plant studies, plant-thinking, sympoietic relations, vegetal subjectivity
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2026
Publication Title
Plants People Planet
Publisher
Wiley
School
School of Arts and Humanities
Funding Information
Edith Cowan University
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Yang, X. (2026). Thinking with trees: Responding to sympoietic plant relations through visual art. Plants People Planet. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.70228