Degree
Doctor of Design (DDes)
Department
College of Art & Design
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation, “Ecosophical Artistic Praxes for Future Ecologies: Matter & Meaning in the Lower Mississippi Delta,” examines the intersections of ecology, embodiment, and feminist curatorial praxis through a collection of writing grounded in curatorial research, fieldwork, and lived experience. The project started as a curatorial initiative titled Finding Grounding, featuring the work of Heather Bird Harris, Shana M. griffin, Renee Royale, and Hannah Chalew—artists whose practices critically engage with the collapsing ecologies of Southeastern Louisiana. Through exhibitions, co-creative programming, and writing, Finding Grounding invites participants to cultivate conscious relationships with place, bridging the spiritual and material disconnections that characterize life amid ecological crisis.
Emerging from my own embodied reckoning through infertility and motherhood, this project approaches curatorial work as a space of attunement and care, where writing and practice function as mutual processes of grounding. Drawing on ecosophy—the ethical-aesthetic philosophy developed by Félix Guattari—this study positions ecology as simultaneously environmental, social, and subjective. It weaves critical theory, poetic reflection, and personal narrative to trouble conventional boundaries between academic analysis and creative expression. This transdisciplinary approach integrates perspectives from deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, and material feminisms, alongside Black feminist geo-ecologies that expose the racialized dimensions of environmental degradation in Louisiana’s extractivist landscape.
By situating artistic practice within embodied experience, Finding Grounding reintroduces matter, sensation, and lived relations into discourses often constrained by abstraction and objectivity. Through fieldwork and writing as modes of encounter, this dissertation embraces diffraction and relational methodologies that foreground contact, vulnerability, and transformation. The included essays examine the entanglements of art, ecology, and being—moving fluidly between critique and poetics to propose an ecosophical curatorial approach rooted in attentiveness, care, and interconnection. Ultimately, this work argues that art and curatorial practices can act as catalysts for re-enlivening human capacities for empathy, solidarity, and ethical responses amid a world of interconnected collapse and renewal.
Date
11-24-2025
Recommended Citation
Taylor, Courtney P., "Ecosophical Artistic Praxes for Future Ecologies: Matter & Meaning in the Lower Mississippi Delta" (2025). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 6962.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/6962
Committee Chair
Young, Allison
Included in
American Art and Architecture Commons, Contemporary Art Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons