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    Welcome

    Louisa Chase is a British artist-writer-researcher.  In 2004, she emigrated to Aotearoa (New Zealand) and lived there for 18 years, returning to the UK in 2022.  She is currently based in the Fenlands of rural Lincolnshire, where she grew up.

    Exposure to Te Ao Māori - the Māori worldview - through working in environmental conservation, through friendships, and through immersion has been central to the process of re-orientating her life and work to focus on path-finding through her native European indigenous traditions and practices​​.  Louisa considers the idea that these have been irrevocably lost to be an anthropocentric viewpoint that sees knowledge as existing only within the individual.  Experience has taught her that knowledge is dispersed and diffracted; that our brains and bodies are not isolated discrete units, but part of a network of interconnected relationality. Knowledge is held not only within the individual human, but within the wider environment, landscape, and more-than-human others, all of which need to be listened to and collaborated with.

    Louisa’s work begins with walking and outdoor movement practice (connected to ecosomatics), and develops from there, often including writing, ritual, photography and working with handmade plant and earth paints.  She works intentionally with duration, cycles, and the many layers of the local.

    Her work is anti-spectacle, slow, quiet, and grounded in practices of witnessing and deep listening​. She incorporates research into ecological, spiritual, cultural, historical, and ancestral perspectives, questioning hierarchies that have led to the multiple crises which we and the planet now face.

    Louisa describes the embodied practices through which she develops her work as ancestral portals to knowing - ways of being in the world that were once essential for survival and balance - walking, working with plants as allies and medicine, reciprocity, ritual, silence, listening with land, more-than-human kin, and natural cycles. In the process, she raises questions about materials and about who we make art for and with, seeing art not just as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a process of caring for all life.

    Diagnosed with autism later in life, Louisa draws on her lived experience of the body-mind as a kind of sensory antenna; a fractal of the whole, tuning into the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible.

    Current and forthcoming group exhibitions 2025

    ART OF THE NOW: Lincoln Museum and Usher Gallery. 20th July to 19th October. Includes two of my works: Ancestral Dreaming (painting) and Libations (video/photographic work). Open Thursday to Monday 10-4.

    DEVOUR: The Feminine Urge Collective. Hull. 29th August to 14th September.

    For a full list of all previous work please go to CV page

    recent work 2025
    Guest Speaker: Learning from the more-than-human. 27/5/25

    Click on the image opposite to watch the recording on YouTube.

    Through creative practice, how can we more deeply engage with, learn from and collaborate with the more-than-human world? What happens when we remember that knowledge is held not only by humans, but by animals, plants and land? How can we deeply listen to, learn from and collaborate with our more-than-human kin? What might we learn about how to better design our own organisations, systems and cultures? And what might we learn about ourselves - our own innate wildness, intuition, and embodied intelligence?


    recent Work 2025
    Winter Research Residency
    Dalby Forest, UK. March 2025

    Two intensive weeks living and working in Dalby Forest on the southern slopes of the North York Moors National Park. A partnership between Crescent Arts, Scarborough, and Forestry England. I used the time for in-vitro study and reflection on my practice in the context of the Culture Declares Emergency Blueprint for Change. A short article on my approach was written at the request of Culture Declares Emergency for the Inspiration section of their website.