Nature-Inspired Art: Exploring Ecological Connection Through Creative Practice

We’re delighted to share a guest blog from Aberdeenshire-based artist Phoebe McBride, whose work explores the intimate connections between nature, place, memory, and loss. In this piece, Phoebe reflects on how ecological encounters shape her creative practice.

Art can open up new ways of seeing landscapes, invite emotional connection, and help us re-imagine our relationship with the living world. Phoebe’s recent work, On Becoming a Water Bat, explores this beautifully—using the accelerated evolution of bats as a way to think about change, grief, and adaptation in her own life.

Bats account for more than a quarter of UK mammal species, and woodlands are essential for their survival: providing roost sites, foraging habitat, sheltered movement corridors, and natural structures that support their echolocation (1). They are also highly vulnerable to habitat loss, making woodland creation and management vital for their future.

We hope you enjoy Phoebe’s reflections on connection, ecology, and creativity - and how returning to the same landscape, season after season, can transform our understanding of both nature and ourselves.

Returning to the River Dee

I am standing on the banks of the River Dee, at our usual spot. The water glistens under a sky of frosted pink and glassy blue. My fingers have turned so numb that I can barely operate the controls on my camera. I have been here for hours now, gathering footage for an upcoming moving image piece, ‘On Becoming a Water Bat: echoes of an unseen world.’ 

As I try, and fail, to change my lens for the third time, I suddenly become aware that I am not as alone as I thought. I lift my head and meet the quiet gaze of a seal. In my excitement, I throw the camera into my bag and run, following her upstream until I can no longer. 

The banks were sparse and dry; when I stopped, I realised I no longer recognised the way I took down to the river. The path, usually obvious when surrounded by leafy foliage and gorse, had flattened into shrubs and earth. 

It occurred to me then, in all the years that I have been visiting this particular spot on the River Dee, that I had not yet visited in winter. A place I thought I knew intimately, softly changed - like looking at the face of a loved one and suddenly noticing how time has changed their features. What happens when we return to a place? When we stop to notice the change and, in turn, let ourselves be changed? 

Reflections on the Importance of Nature

Looking to rituals of loss and healing, my practice is interested in the role art can play in grief work and navigating ecological loss. Though I work through a range of different mediums, I tend to gravitate towards moving image and text. I see the camera as an investigative tool, allowing me to explore the subtle shifts of landscape, season and species. Art is, for me, a form of access - not necessarily to definitive answers, but to attention, connection, and speculation. 

In 2020, I found myself navigating the sudden loss of my mother. Processing grief in the time of a pandemic was, unfortunately, the reality for so many across the world. Subconsciously, I turned to the natural world to process this loss, creating small rituals for myself around changing restrictions such as swimming in the river during the day and walking with bats at night. 

On these walks I would carry with me a heterodyne bat detector - a small device that translates echolocation calls into rhythms of audible clicks. Through it, I began listening to a language usually inaccessible to human ears, one shaped by the environment. 

When reflecting on this period, I found myself focusing on this act of making the inaudible audible - and by the concept of interspecies communication. What might we learn if we tuned more carefully into the living world around us, especially now, in times of ecological crisis?

I was also researching how grief presents in the human body, partly in an attempt to understand some of the changes I had been experiencing due to grief. At the same time, I had stumbled on an article about bats in warmer climates whose wingspans were expanding to help regulate body heat (2). The two became intertwined - premature evolutions through loss.

Bats are chronically misunderstood creatures in western culture, often seen as scary, much larger than they actually are and are linked to the occult. They often go unseen unless we deliberately look for them, and turn up in our homes with great inconvenience. 

In other words, the perfect metaphor for grief. 

It’s that something flickering at the edges of our perception, asking for our attention, our care, our understanding. 

At the Bat Bothy

The commission for On Becoming a Water Bat came at the end of October, when the bats I had hoped to film had already settled in for the winter. This is what led me to the Bat Bothy in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, where I met Dee Lawlor, who generously shared her knowledge as an expert in her field and introduced me to Rowdy - a soprano pipistrelle who was unable to be released back into the wild (3). 

Our conversations spanned the altruistic nature of bats to Dee’s plans for rewilding the land surrounding the Bothy. Participating in these conversations around restoration, habitat, and possibility helped shape my understanding of how creative practice can participate in ecological thinking - not only through means of advocacy, but through care, reciprocity, and the textures of relationship. 

Noticing Nature

When we return to a place, season after season, we might learn to read its subtle signals of the year to come, and the years that have been. To be with a landscape is to be with its past, present, and future at once. 

Art is not separate from the living world but in constant dialogue with it. For me, the process of making calls for attention. It offers methods to speculate alternate ways of being that support ecological restoration. It can offer ways of making sense of grief and pave pathways for communication and knowledge exchange. It reminds us of the possibilities of renewal and it invites us to return - again and again.

A huge thank you to Phoebe for writing such a beautiful blog reflecting on connection with, and importance of, our natural world. Phoebe has also kindly made On Becoming a Water Bat available for limited-time screening on her website until 5 January! You can explore the film, along with more of Phoebe’s work, via her website and her instagram. 

Interested in supporting woodland projects with a key focus on the co-benefits they deliver? Explore our Nature+ projects! 

For readers interested in supporting bat conservation, the Bat Conservation Trust offers helpful guidance. 

1. Gov.UK, Forestry Commission Blog, The importance of woodland and trees to UK bats, https://forestrycommission.blog.gov.uk/2024/05/22/the-importance-of-woodland-and-trees-to-uk-bats/#:~:text=Bats%20account%20for%20more%20than,along%20woodland%20edges%20and%20waterways 

2. The Guardian, Helena Horton, Animals ‘shapeshifting’ in response to climate crisis, research finds, 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/07/animals-shapeshifting-in-response-to-climate-crisis-research-finds

3. To find out more about the Bat Bothy - Press and Journal, Keiran Beattie, The Aberdeenshire woman building a ‘Bothy’ for poorly bats, 2022 https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/aberdeen-aberdeenshire/4476021/aberdeenshire-bat-bothy/ For now, Dee’s current focus is on advocating for better controls around bat handling in the UK. Dee is also an author! Check out her instagram here