GEORGE BUDDEN

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BREVITY - ‘QUEER IN NATURE’ GUIDED WALK


Commissioned by Brevity, an Isle of Wight based literary handbill and writing organisation, for their Arts Council Funded Queer workshop series ‘Hear me Now’, I produced and led a guided walk exploring queer language and identity through nature and flowers.


The Queer in Nature guided walk looked to explore human sexual and gender identities by drawing similarities in plants and nature. The themes of the walk were split into two parts; firstly the biological queerness of certain plants’ homosexual and transgender properties, and secondly the idea of drawing elements of our identities from the plants around us. It is important to me that participants chose to engage with these themes as lightheartedly or as emotionally as they felt. To give an example; I might identify with a climbing ivy plant because I can be clingy! Or perhaps Lily because I’m bisexual. By the end of the session we all have a beautiful mixture of inspirational and similar plants that can help us to find new ways of describing our identities beyond existing terms and categories.

At the beginning, I gave a short and accessible introduction to what I interpret queer nature as (plants with ‘both genitalia’, plants that change gender etc.), the things we were aiming to explore during the walk, and what we hoped to take from the session. I brought an Instant Camera, film and tape so participants could visually capture the plants they identify with. 


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