Walking is a way to communicate with Nature, walking removes our eyes from the screens of our telephones and we do it with our heads held high – not in a proud way – but so that we are able to (really) take a look at the world and start afresh a new relationship with it. They are called Cultivators and they are mazes created by the artist Laura K Reeder. They are drawings made whilst walking, the environment engraved, over grass meadows and open land, beneath snowdrifts or leaves. Temporary furrows that are dug in a continuous meditative peregrination upon the land without any plan but with the aim to explore the boundaries, the power and the coexistence between Mankind and Nature.

“We learn so much by moving around a shared space” Reeder claims when talking about her Cultivators. It is, indeed, a matter of fact that people who spend a lot of time in Nature know this for a fact; if, of course it is carried out by distancing our gazes from telephone screens, pc’s and tablets. In addition to this, the situation is even further enhanced by managing not to dwell upon the things we normally have to do as well as all of our work problems. If we can observe what is all around us, we begin to see many things or see things in another light. The change in the seasons, for example, the change in the consistency of the soil based on temperature and rainfall, biodiversity in all its glory: “When Nature and daily life find full alignment, we may walk, draw and reconnect” the artist explains. She, too, in life is actively involved in educational and awareness projects.

Laura K Reeder’s Cultivators are guided by environmental elements, by physical movement and by social interaction. Solitude and community are interwoven and give life to such a precious exchange. We learn from each other, from the earth beneath us, and from our presences and from our absences. Walking in order to leave a trace of ourselves is not just a way we might get to know the environment, but it is also a way to retrieve our relationship with the world. Reeder believes that we are increasingly bent over the bright screens of our smartphones, so much so that Mankind today no longer “merely” needs to seek solace in cleansing polluted waters or diseased soil, but we must also retrieve our ability to interact with the space that surrounds us. It is just as if, by making use of our own creativity, we might succeed in developing our skills at critical thinking. The latter is notably absent in contemporary society – a society that is ever more passive, a mere onlooker, used to observing uninterrupted flows of images, static images or moving images, faraway and, occasionally, even fantastical.

This is where the name Cultivator comes in. It refers to those who undertake such an action, to those who with their own bodies shift and carve the ground beneath them, inviting others to follow suit. Her works draw attention to the ways in which we may move, breathe, observe and listen, without causing any harm.

“I despair at the damage caused to humanity, to the environment and to the future, by having no notion of the elements of a place” Reeder says. Since one thing is certain, how can we protect something that we do not know? Who can take care of something that we have forgotten? The Cultivators are the activators of our memory, our ancestral memory, of when we were at one with the world. The Cultivators are works which transport us back to a primordial state, when Nature succeeded in being felt and Mankind did not wish to prevail over everything.