A creative methods workshop organized by CREATURE.
What does it mean to write with the ground beneath our feet? The two-day workshop Walking & Writing invites scholars, artists, and educators to discover how the act of moving through space and being in place can coax out stories, textures, and relations that belong as much to soil, stone, water, wind, sound, and light as to human and more-than-human intention. The ambition is to develop a toolbox of playful yet rigorous methods for weaving together bodies, environments, and words, demonstrating that walking & writing can help us re‑imagine how we inhabit and narrate the world.
The first day, artist-researcher Helena Hunter will facilitate close encounters with more-than-human nature. Industrial designer Petra Lilja will then draw our attention to the rock beneath our feet. Drawing on the environment of the Sørmarka forest surrounding the University of Stavanger campus, both sessions blend fieldwork and movement, highlighting how embodied movement contributes to uncovering layers of meaning. On the second day, workshop participants will collaborate in an exploration of emergent methods, reflecting on how walking & writing can foreground more‑than‑human agencies—soil, stone, water, wind, sound and light—as active participants in place‑making.
Key information
Day 1: 9:00 – 15:30, University of Stavanger, Hulda Garborgs hus HG N-107
Day 2: 9:00 – 12:00, University of Stavanger, Hulda Garborgs hus HG N-106
The workshop is free to attend, but there is a limited number of spaces. Registration is required: https://nettskjema.no/a/564587. Participation on only one of the two days is possible, but we will prioritize those who can commit to the whole event. We will provide lunch for registered participants. The first day involves outdoor activities.
Helena Hunter: Reimagining Fieldwork: Art, Poetry and the Practice of Environmental Inquiry
The session begins with an introduction to ‘Algae Ecologies’, Hunter’s cross-disciplinary exploration of poetry, science and the marine environment. In this project, she collaborated with marine scientists, learning field and lab methods of marine sampling, snorkel surveys and microscopy. Alongside this, she developed poetic and artistic methods, culminating in a series of visual and poetic artworks. During the talk, she will share her creative process, contextualising her research within the environmental/blue humanities and contemporary poetics.
The talk will be followed by a hands-on workshop that reimagines scientific and environmental fieldwork through artistic and poetic methods. Together, we will explore the Sørmarka forest through field-based activities that emphasise listening, sensing and creative response. Participants will create poetic field notes, photographs and audio recordings that capture their encounters with the site. Sharing our work, we will weave together a collaborative patchwork ecology that reveals the forest as both familiar and strange.
Helena Hunter works at the intersections of visual art, poetry and science. She holds a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and is currently pursuing an AHRC-funded PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University in partnership with the University of Warwick. Her practice incorporates fieldwork and laboratory studies with archival research and collaborative projects with scientists to investigate the critical ecologies of environmental change. She was recently an artist in residence at the Scottish Association for Marine Science and collaborates with sound artist Mark Peter Wright in her practice, Matterlurgy. A recent publication is ‘Algae ecologies: an exploration of poetry and marine science methods across the lab and field’, Applied Phycology, 2025. Helena was an Artist Associate for the Art, Technology, Society programme at Delfina Foundation in London, and has been nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Awards for Visual Artists. Her work has been showcased internationally at venues such as the Wellcome Collection, Gasworks, Arts Catalyst, Tate Modern, ICA, LUX, and Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Onassis Stegi (GR), Bòlit Contemporary Arts Centre, Medialab Matadero (ES), and Titanik Gallery (FI). Find her online at https://www.helenahunter.net
Petra Lilja: Mineral Walk & Workshop
Welcome to this Mineral Walk & Workshop led by Petra Lilja (PhD), designer and researcher whose work explores diffractive practices of design –methods that generate knowledge through the entanglement of material, site, and thought. Diffractive here refers to working with patterns of difference and interference, i.e. how insights emerge not by reflection or comparison, but through the entangled relations between bodies, materials, and ideas. Petra will guide participants in exploring how artistic methods can act as a bridge between material and discursive practices, with the aim of re-grounding theory through embodied, tactile engagement with place.
Drawing from her dissertation Mineral Matterings: Diffractive Practices of Design (2024), the workshop introduces walking as a more-than-human epistemic practice: a way of attuning to geological and ecological temporalities, activating sensory and ethical ways of knowing, and treating place and matter as co-theorists rather than illustrations of theory.
Through a Mineral Walk in Sørmarka, an urban forest undergoing ecological transformation, participants will collectively map, trace, and materialize their encounters with place. The aim is not to represent the site but to learn with it, foregrounding situated and material gestures as a way of thinking.
Together, we will reflect on how artistic and diffractive practices (rooted, tactile, and situated) can complement the participants existing forms of academic inquiry by moving from words to wider actions, and from extraction toward ecological reciprocity.
Petra Lilja is a designer, researcher (PhD), and curator based in Malmö, working also in Stockholm and Växjö, Sweden. Through artistic, studio-based material explorations and academic research, Lilja’s work critically examines the geo-political and socio-ecological challenges of design practices entangled with the extractivist logic, emphasizing relational ontologies and the intra-actions between humans, materials, and the environment. Petra Lilja holds a doctoral degree in Art, Technology and Design from the University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, resulting in the thesis Mineral Matterings: Diffractive Practices of Design. Lilja’s curatorial practice resulted e.g. in the exhibition The Future is Handmade, Kalmar Konstmuseum and for four years she ran an eponymous galley in Malmö displaying art, design and artistic research projects. She is a member of the jury of the annual Swedish Design award (UNG Svensk Form) and the Korea+Sweden Young Design Award (KSYDA) in South Korea. Lilja is an affiliated researcher at The Posthumanities Hub and a member of the network Design+Posthumanism. Part time, besides her artistic practice, she works as a senior lecturer and program coordinator of the Design + Change MFA Program at Linnaeus University. Find her online at https://www.petralilja.com
