Sustaining Childhood Natures: The Art of Becoming with Water

In this book, the children I share my life with and the waters of every day have entangled with artists, artworks and philosophy, in a wild and unexpected flow. Water deltas into multiple tangential productions, querying: how we might sustain (our) childhood natures? What happens in the collaborative process of creatively re-searching sustainability with artists, water and children? In the local area of Western Port, Victoria, Australia, I engaged in an arts-based post-qualitative inquiry over eight years. As a mother, educator, researcher, marine ecologist and maker, I looked to artists who created artworks in relation to water to investigate how art-making might contribute to traditional science-based sustainability education. Where I began with the query: What alternative relationship is negotiated and knowledge attained between an artist and a waterway in the art-making process, a new query surfaced along the way during the gestation and birth of my daughter, Edith, and later Vivi. I continued musing how can I sustain waterways if I am not sustaining myself? This research emerges methodologies of early motherhood. Artworks, photographs and transcripts of time spent with eight women, including my daughters, entered on a private journal/blog as poetic notes (bodyplaceblogposts). These are encountered backwards on review. Data analysed in the blog is discovered to be data again in the writing process, as a new layer of writing wends around the bodyplaceblogposts in the opposite direction of time, with philosophies of space, place, body, materiality and time. An abundance of matter is played with, including the philosophical materials of Bachelard, Barad, Deleuze, Grosz, Guattari, Kristeva, MacLure, Rautio, Somerville, St. Pierre plus more, and the domestic matter of my mothering, everyday life with children and water. Sustainability, as a movement, is traditionally defined as resisting the catastrophe before the end, sustaining what we have in rations—a provocation of lack. New possibilities for sustaining childhood natures—for what is becoming, and unbecoming—emerge here in the making processes of an academic, everyday life in early motherhood