Soil Party: Rats, Roots, Worms, and Other Punks is a multimedia, multiscreen project created using watercolour painting and animation. It consists of twenty gifs that depict the vibrancy and aliveness of the soil, where organisms like rodents, roots, and worms live a busy and active life.

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This project has been influenced by the work of indigenous philosophers Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, and Brian Burkhart, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, and environmental author William Bryant Logan. These scholars discuss how humans' understanding of soil influences how they see themselves and the world as a whole.​ According to them, the soil's vibrancy, agency, and inventiveness have been overlooked in traditional western thought, and the soil has been viewed, along with other minorities (the other punks in the title), as a flat and passive background for white man's foreground actions. Traditional Western philosophy supported the concept of the human being as an abstract and unrooted entity, with theoretical thought regarded as superior to activities relating to the body and material world. This has historically been used as justification for western imperialist and colonialist activities that devastated local communities by destroying their means of subsistence—their connections to their lands.​ In this artistic project, I consider debates concerning the relationship between Western traditional understandings of soil and other marginalising narratives.

 

My gifs do not depict accurate scientific data, despite the fact that I regard scientific research to be vital in rejecting a traditional understanding of soil as flat and passive. Instead, I represent a small selection of soil's beings using an imaginative, fantastical, and colourful visual style to shift the audience's imagination and desires about soil, encouraging them to consider it as a rich, diversified, and creative entity.