"The Making of An Ecological Being"

Blog date: November 2025.

In my later adolescence I developed an uncanny conviction that I would become a visual artist, I became absolutely convinced. I describe this as uncanny because it felt grounded in a deeply embedded connection, as if I was responding to an ancient ancestral story, I didn't have the wherewithal at that time for a nuanced understanding of what this meant but I knew it was a story I should follow. After finishing with school I undertook a foundational training in fine art and then established a studio but soon began to realise that I needed other particular developmental experience if I was to accomplish the work for which I had a powerful intuition. I eventually decided to undertake a world trip as a first step to further this quest, what I did not appreciate at the time was the scale of the task I had set myself and the long labyrinthine journey that lay before me. A three year trip visiting twenty countries across five continents including Iran, Balochistan, Pakistan and India, Australia, South Pacific Islands and both North and South America was only the beginning. The length of time that began to elapse meant these other ''developmental'' experiences became a marathon and a chastening challenge to my original conviction.

I lived my life for a long time without directly taking up the role of artist, nevertheless the conviction remained. This journey to becoming a practicing artist eventually culminated whilst living at a remote hill farm in North Wales after the death of a person close to me and the potent aftermath of this experience. This included the dynamic intervention of Corvids both Crows and Ravens as direct initiators in my immediate world. Their self-willed interventions and one particularly startling event of crows hurling themselves at my bedroom window in the middle of the night, transformed my consciousness of death, its impacts and my responsibilities in managing this process. This directly led to me establishing a small shrine and undertaking ritual ceremonial acts. The keeping of the shrine and its rituals led to the making of a symbolic ''death journey painting''. The act of making such a painting brought about a powerful psychic imperative to continue painting, it was the potent nature of this experience that laid down the foundations for all the Image-Story making work to come. In this way I finally became a long-term maker of visual art. I have now been practicing as an artist for 25 years albeit outside modern and contemporary art paradigms.

Until 2012 I worked as a community-based psychotherapist alongside my art-making, working for both NGOs and Statutory Child Protection services. This work included the roles of Play Therapist and Project Directer and also included the facilitation of community mural-making, social theatre and large and small groupwork programmes with children and their families. Currently I also have a lead role as Founder and Facilitator at ''Ecology of Being'' where my artwork plays a central role in the initiatory and developmental processes at the core of this project.

I came to the Marchlands of South-East Scotland in 2015 after a two year stay in Ontario and Quebec in Canada. I began my orientation to this place by walking the trails of its salmon river, its wider riparian sphere, its woodlands and its hills. I always walk, this is my way of finding entry points into a depth communing relationship with the remnant wild nature around me. My artworks are always visual transmissions of my ecological relationship with place. My relationship with this place is multifaceted but has two principal interwoven strands; Firstly, my Image-Story paintings here emerge through a depth connective engagement with ancient ancestral presence embedded in these lands and deep connective memories embedded in me. Secondly, my depth attunement relationship with nature enables personal and visceral identification with more-than-human persons who reside in this biome, I describe these as ''Totemic relationships'', they are my guides and teachers. These encounters and relationships facilitate a deep immersive and connective education within the greater nature system.

Since the days of its first occupation by settled modern humans, this land has been utterly changed but this is the case across all the lands of these Isles, they are amongst some of the most nature-degraded places in the world. Once people settled here and began to farm and control nature, the original vast diverse biome of this place, including its indigenous peoples were completely eradicated. It is difficult to even comprehend the magnitude of this destruction, the destruction of the land, its persons both human and more-than-human and also of the attuned mind and soul of the remaining humans. This is a deeply traumatic loss, it is embedded in the history of this place although mostly forgotten by its modern peoples and it defines its psycho-ecological character. For those who carry the consciousness of this loss and its profound meaning and consequences, it is an act of taking ecological responsibility to honour these sacred lands and its lost ancient human and more-than-human persons and its now small, remaining remnant wild nature. The carrying of this loss is a powerful awakening and expanding of ecological consciousness, it is an active knowledge that shapes everything that is to be understood about the psyche of this place. It is the beginning place for a powerful psycho-ecological re-education.

In 2018 I completed a painting at my studio on the banks of the river here, this came to be called ''SheShaman''. This artwork marked a major transitional event in my practice and further deepened my ecological connection with this land. It brought me into direct engagement with the apparitional presence of ancient original human forebears embedded in the psyche of this place. These apparitional figures flowed directly through my depth connective attunement with the place and through the painting process they manifest a creation story. Preceding this moment I had been using demarcated areas within the painting surface as the focal point for the emerging ecological stories that I am now part of, I call these ''apertures''. They are windows of communication that act as portals, they provide entry points for the viewer to connect with the ancestral and primordial energy and stories of this place. In the SheShaman painting this demarcated area expanded to become the whole painted surface, marking the moment when the embedded presence of these ancient humans became fully present, a concrete manifestation. These figures communicate a remarkable story that is articulated across deep-time. While I was immersed in the making of this work, in the physiology, the ritual and the dance of its figures, I underwent a profound transformative experience that amounted to an initiation into their world. I was able to travel with them so that I might understand connective reality. I was able to imbibe and comprehend the ecological unity within nature expressed in their ritual ceremonial enactment and transmit a visual understanding of their ecological story, also interpreting this primordial narrative in the form of an ''Incantation'' that came to be named ''The Stellar Oracle''.

The SheShaman Image Story and its incantation are currently part of an exhibition that can be freely accessed by signing up at NallaRuer.earth

My role as Image Maker has always been the role of communicator between the present and the ancient, the whole developmental journey of my artwork could be framed as a depth psycho-archaeological exploration. In this context, I act as a medium and each step on the way in this process demands an expansion of consciousness and a personal connection to the sacredness of this part of the Earthland. This has been fundamental to telling the stories of ecological knowledge enacted in the lives of our ancient human forebears and more-than-human persons past and present, the story of those who live in unity within nature and enact their lives with other nature as their greater sacred family. The imperative to tell these hugely important stories, these 'streams' of Earth consciousness and Earth intelligence, is made graphic by witnessing the near complete loss of connective unity within nature in modern human cultures and the modern human mind. This is also paralleled by the huge multi-faceted psycho-ecological crisis that humans have manufactured and that now impacts the whole of life on Earth. Modern humans have mostly lost all sense of the sacredness of nature and the sacredness of themselves within nature. This understanding remains resolutely outside the belief systems of modern humans, it is absent from our modern dualistic minds, it is nevertheless an eviscerating loss and also a huge danger to our present and future life on Earth.

I must make a sharp distinction here between modern humans and modern Indigenous, Aboriginal and First Nation humans who often remain Earth connected and remember some of their ancestors profound understanding of the sacred Earth contract by which all humans should live. While much of these peoples lives and cultures are contaminated by modern colonial imposition and their ecological knowledge is thereby compromised, they remain of inestimable value to the understanding and development of depth ecological consciousness for the whole of humanity. I am personally indebted, as they are, to their original ancestors and their unhindered transmissions of connective Earth intelligence still alive and embedded in place. They are a greater part of the soil by which I have been able to develop and grow and make my art. Many of these peoples have suffered and continue to suffer despicable behaviour from other modern humans both in their past and current guises of colonialism. The continuing devastating oppression, stealing of land and murder of indigenous land nurturers and land defenders across the world has not stopped them from standing up for their rights or the rights of their Earthland. Many of these people remain the bearers of Earth intelligence and are principal psycho-ecological teachers and leaders but the injustice perpetrated upon them is immense as the guilt and responsibility of the perpetrators is vast. A depth reparation must be enacted, that is a sacred duty yet to be understood by most peoples alive today.

Communicating across time through art necessitates working from a position of deep respect for all nature, this practice is structured and governed by the demanding strictures of equity, mutuality, reciprocity and reverence. These are the guardrails for intercommunication within nature. This way of working enabled my painting process to act as a conduit for the telling of the powerful ancient origin story of these SheShaman. To be precise, it is the telling of the origin story of the ancient matriarchal forebears of this place, from a time when the feminine was understood as the axis of life and when these SheShaman were revered progenitors. When respect for females was foundational to living, a time before the modern human over-masculinised psyche dominated all human development - a profound enacting of the subjugation of the soul.

This way of working means operating with an enhanced responsibility for the making and communicating of such important Initiatory Art. This potently expands the responsibilities on the artist to integrate a commitment to the dissemination and transmission of these emergent works and their emergent knowledge. This enhanced understanding of the need for an expansion of practice marked a significant step in the evolving journey of establishing Ecology of Being, which is fundamentally 'a heeding of the call to depth ecological consciousness' reverberating across our Earthland today.

While contemplating all of this, at the time of completing the SheShaman painting, I found myself pacing up and down in my studio trying to figure out my next steps, I felt overpowered because I was holding and trying to comprehend all of this powerful energy. I looked out of the large studio window toward the river and hills beyond, I took in the view, it was a calming experience, I relaxed, but then suddenly, with a dramatic entrance, a large river Heron came crashing into view. She was at such close quarters and in what seemed like a time-lapse, that I was completely taken aback and transfixed. This was no place for a heron, in this tangle of bushes, trees and buildings, she had just flown straight into my psychic sphere, in a very particular moment, it was a powerful act of synchronicity. She let out her archaic guttural call, an echoing across the ages, it was a melding of our souls. In a flash, I flowed into this journey across time with her, we were mutually possessed, we belonged to the ancient world, to the same family, she had completely altered my state of consciousness, in an instant I was journeying with her.

The timing of this could not have been more acute, her appearance made everything much more pronounced, she drew all of my psychic attention to the potency of this moment, in this dynamic encounter. The Heron are the sentinels of the Salmon river where I walk all the time, they had already begun to weave their magic and I had begun to understand something of their extended intelligence, I already had great respect for the Heron but this was to be of another order. The connective forces of nature were playing their hand, I had been drawn into a profound psycho-ecological role and as part of that I was now drawn into a powerful state of mutuality with the Heron, she was to become one of my principal guides and teachers. I had been offered the task of taking a different kind of journey at a moment when the demands on my psyche and the demands of my work were developmentally acute. This encounter with the Heron offered me the possibility of establishing a dynamic totemic relationship and she was already taking the lead as the change agent in this process.

I was immediately possessed by a compulsion to paint the Heron, I primed a large square wooden panel, engraining patination in the primed layers, I drew Herons and laid out planes of transparent blue green. The style of this painting and its subsequent series remained completely distinct from all my other work, it was work in parallel and furthermore a communing in the present. I came to realise in this process that a relationship with the Heron offered me a powerful regulating and grounding experience. This would be of enormous value as I managed the considerable psychic and ecological demands of everything I was undertaking. My regular encounters with the Heron would now be pronounced, I would have to pay great attention, they would be my Guide, and Initiator. She would teach the ways of the riparian world and shape my learning in it, they would provide balance and it would be my responsibility to honour the Heron and the depth learning journey with them.

The finished painting was named ''Heron Clan'' and it would become part of a whole matrix of Heronland paintings. This changed the whole perspective and progress of my work. The emerging balance of my relationships in the present with the more-than-human world and my encounters with the presence of the ancient world has proved invaluable in my own psycho-ecological balance but also in the transmission and comprehension of the work. Understanding the vital importance of establishing relationships with more-than-human persons and their presence has become central to the developmental work of Ecology of Being. Developing these encounters heals the dualistic complex of the modern human mind, they are foundational to establishing depth ecological consciousness. It is absolutely clear that most modern humans have lost their intimate spiritual relationships within nature, a grave consequence of this is the vast, continuing destruction of our Earthland beyond belief. Repairing and learning from our relations with other persons of nature, having them as our guides is fundamental to recovering our ecological selves and taking responsibility to restore reverence for nature within ourselves. We cannot do this without more-than-human guides.

This is absolutely critical and will enable us to become dynamic actors in the huge task of restoring psycho-ecological balance in the modern human world. These artworks and acts of transformation are the essential synthesis at the heart of the work of Ecology of Being.

NallaRuer - Visual Artist and Co-Founder of ''Ecology of Being''

Connect with the work of NallaRuer and the Community of Ecology of Being at nallaruer.earth.