‘Mothering Beyond the Flesh’ – talk and film screening

Postgraduate Researcher Clare Carter Osborne will share details of her current research in this talk organised by the Environmental Humanities Research Group.

In this talk, Clare Carter Osborne will introduce her PhD project ‘Mothering Beyond the Flesh’ and how she came to situate her auto-ethnographic research about the relationship between motherhood, ecology and landscape on the island of Lanzarote.

She will also talk about how the eco-colonial history of the Canary Islands became a central theme in her work.

Clare will discuss the research she has carried out in The Green Heart of Haría in Lanzarote – a garden created by British scientist David Riebold – and how learning about the endemic species of flora transformed her experience of the landscape and motherhood. Part of an ancient and fragile ecosystem, these plants became a kind of ‘feeling-lens’ with which to connect to the landscape, its history and the imagining of its future.

Two short videos will be shared, with discussions between them. One of the videos is a 20 minute clip from Clare's film ‘Unimagined: mothering beyond the flesh’ which is the final output of her PhD project, a work in progress due to be completed and released by the end of the year. The video looks at David’s reforestation project in Haría, using fog-catchers for irrigation.

The second is a shorter video of David’s rewilded garden, documenting all the rare endemic and native plants to the island of Lanzarote.

Living in David’s rewilded garden and learning about his reforestation project exposed both a sense of loss and hope in Clare’s understanding of motherhood and how to care for our landscapes of the Anthropocene.

This event is organised by the Environmental Humanities Research Group, Visual Cultures of Ecology, based in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies.

It is free to attend and all are welcome.

About the speaker

Clare Carter Osborne is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher with a history of songwriting, music composition and performance. Her practice is auto-ethnographic and engages with site-specific projects that explore the human attachment to landscape and notions of world-making.

Clare finished her MA Fine Art in September 2022 at the University of Leeds. She was awarded a White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH) doctoral training scholarship for her PhD research project in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies.

Venue

Student Common Room
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
University Road
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT

AccessAble guide to the building.

Image

Still from Clare Carter Osborne’s film, ‘Unimagined: mothering beyond the flesh’ (2026).