For the past two decades, artist, writer, and educator Lucy Davis (b. 1970) has been weaving an interdisciplinary practice that draws from ecology and more-than-human connections. Davis, who grew up in Singapore, is perhaps best known for her 2008 founding of Migrant Ecologies Projects, a collaborative platform bringing together a motley range of artists, musicians, researchers, and cinematographers to investigate Southeast Asian nature and culture. 

Across film, installation, publication, and more, Davis and her collaborators work at the intersections of more-than-human worlds, connecting trees and woodcut prints, crocodiles and indigenous knowledge, birds and railways.

Early this year, Lucy Davis was in town to give a presentation of her ongoing collaborative project Biji-biji Buaya Crocodile Seeds at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She also hosted “seed gleaning” sessions at the NUS Museum, inviting participants to collect cereal and flower seeds from the straw stuffing of a 140-year-old taxidermised crocodile. Davis speaks with artist and researcher Zhai Qiutong about how to situate creative ecological research in rich emotional and sensory experiences:

(The following text is adapted from an interview conducted by Zhai in February 2025, with editorial input from Davis given in September 2025.)

Tell us about where you are right now, what the weather is like, and what you are feeling.

I am in East Helsinki. This winter is kind of grey, since we haven’t had much snow. The sea is beginning to melt, which normally happens in about April. It’s sludgy, and if it freezes at night, then everything that’s melted in the day becomes ice, which makes it hard for elderly people to get around. People are not happy about the way climate change is impacting the north. Now I’m getting my head together to prepare for a new course I am teaching at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland, where I am currently the head of a small, transdisciplinary master’s programme in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art.

Please share more about your time in and relationship with Singapore. I’m curious about your earlier preoccupations in your artistic practice.

I worked as an artist in my 20s, but largely outside of the university. My master’s studies were in communications and development studies in Denmark, where I also worked in theatre. My thesis was on political aesthetic strategies in Singapore.

My access to the Singapore art community evolved through writing and commissioning work about art and society across Southeast Asia. This involved an associate artist position at [the theatre company] The Necessary Stage, where we started this anthology series, FOCAS Forum on Contemporary Art & Society (2000–2007).The last volume Regional Animalities, launched at [the exhibition] documenta 12, was on more-than-human relations in Southeast Asia. After FOCAS lost our arts council funding, I went back to my practice and started Migrant Ecologies Projects, which was conceptually informed by this last volume.

What are some significant influences in your creative journey?

Simryn Gill’s practice has and will always be important to my practice. I greatly admire how the conceptual evolves from the material in Simryn’s works as much as the other way around. In terms of storytelling, conversations with Spell#7, the performance company started by Kaylene Tan and Paul Rae, together with Ben Slater. In the early 2000s, they were thinking about a fragmented narrative and storytelling in a collage form, which connects very much to the story ecologies that I am trying to craft. 

Another influence is Alfian Sa’at, a dear friend of over 25 years, whose eco-political writings have huge resonance. His essay, Talking in Trees, is about the tenacious presence of plants in the Malay language, including in ways that one perceives the human body. For example, the eyeball is “biji” in Malay, which means “seed.” He writes: “The ‘pohon telinga’ (tree of the ear) is where it is attached to the head. The ‘daun telinga’ (leaf of the ear) is the outer ear.”

In this essay Alfian demonstrates how the prevalent presence of plants determines how the human body is imagined, and how words are formed. One might think humans are exceptional because we have language, but, actually, the sounds we make, the forms we articulate, are so often borrowed from other beings. Later on, we drew upon Alfian’s essay to co-craft an installation Talking in Trees (Like Shadows Through Leaves) for the Singapore Biennale in 2022.

How do you think we can do a better job at perceiving other species? 

We will never fully know other beings. We will never truly know each other! But we can do our best to attune. We can learn as much as we can from the tools that we have, which could be science and biology, which could be local ethnozoology or ethnobotany, which could be art or dance performance. This could also involve a a kind of critical anthropomorphism. This perspective acknowledges that we will always be anthropomorphic [i.e., interpret nonhuman things in human terms], but that a reflexive kind of anthropomorphism can enable us to test the analogies we draw between other species and our own, and still take us somewhere. 

Human brains are good at creating connections between things. Some of the ways we try to connect don’t work, and we misunderstand, but then we can try another connection. It is possible to put out feelers, build these fragile bridges towards the other. The dualistic arrogance of the last 400-odd years of Western modern thinking has cut us off from the fact that we too are animals and have an inextricable, embodied interconnection to the beings and worlds around us. Our very own gut microbiome is itself a more-than-human ecosystem. We are always already connected. 

You talk about how we can approach these connections on different levels and from the perspectives of various disciplines, including art. What is it about art that is helpful, in your opinion? And how are you exploring these aspects in your projects?

The people doing the interesting work in the more-than-human turn have not all been artists. I am thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Potawatomi Nation botanist, of Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers, both philosophers, and of Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, and her late partner James Scott, all of whom are anthropologists. Tsing argues, borrowing from Scott, how cereals domesticated us, demanding of humans a particular form of patriarchal organisation for cereals like rice and wheat to flourish. Tsing’s counterpoint is of course famously the mushroom at the edges of capital. This kind of thinking, and also the experimental way that Tsing writes, have both been hugely important for so many artists.

Another thing entirely, coming from Southeast Asia, is what is left of pre-colonial, animist perspectives and how these still circulate in contemporary urban everyday life. The idea that everything around us is living, vibrant, and potentially conscious is something Western theorists have only begun to rediscover.

Migrant Ecologies’ practice is about amplifying and augmenting these approaches and perspectives, and also about making them accessible, so that they can be touched, listened to, felt, and evoke emotional reactions. If you go to a Migrant Ecologies exhibition, there are trees, birds, and songs. There are tactile materials and hopefully poetic means to access political-ecological layers of the stories we tell, without the viewer having to have all this conceptual knowledge. Animation has of course an early relationship to animism, by making things alive and expressing metamorphic possibility.

In our work with crocodile seeds, it is the material experience of 140-year-old seeds, the mangrove, the dulangs [trays used to pan for tin ores], and the turning of hands searching for seeds and searching for tin that together do the theoretical work. I hope we are creating experiences that are open worlds, rather than bringing about semiotic closure. We are not trying to illustrate theory or science or any perspective with art. Materials and gestures themselves do theoretical work and generate knowledge — ways of understanding our world and each other.

Can you elaborate on how the sensorial engagement in your art making is a form of research and knowledge production?

I see all art making as knowledge production, in that ideas circulate in not necessarily linguistic but multi-sensorial ways. Research can also involve more-than-human collaborations. In [the multimedia project] Railtrack Songmaps, humans are learning from birds. We have humans calling to birds and birds that are calling back, and it is not clear whether it is a human or a bird calling. In [the film] Like Shadows Through Leaves, we’ve got the shadows of trees as collaborators in a cinematic story telling process. There is an ecology of knowledge and story production.

The audio-visual iteration of our current research project Biji-biji Buaya Crocodile Seeds is an essay-style film in 13 chapters, all of which start with “Stories are Like.” It’s voiced by Ajey Hassan, an Orang Semai activist from Perak. Several of these chapters include more-than-human perspectives. For example: “Stories are Like Caves,” “Stories are Like Waters.” And in each, sound artist Zai Tang and I hope to evoke the presences of and even questions from Caves, Waters, Shadows, et cetera.

You are also an art educator. How does your practice influence how you teach?

I fear that many academic institutions don’t completely understand what art can do. They still think it’s about art illustrating other knowledge, not realising that even the most abstract painting is knowledge production in and of itself. 

Following many feminist, more-than-human, new materialist thinkers, emotions are also part of this knowledge making process. Knowledge is always situated. Situated knowledge means acknowledging the political, social, and also the emotional and embodied perspectives that feed your explorations. For example, I like very much how you started our conversation by asking about the weather, because understanding is enabled by embodied context, including where we are at and the way that we feel as we communicate. Asking about the weather is asking me to situate myself in my current emotional-ecology. 

When participating in a seed gleaning session in your ongoing Biji-biji Buaya Crocodile Seeds project, my senses were fully engaged with sight, touch, smell, and imagination (through shared stories among the gleaners). As we made gestures of caretaking and labour-sharing, we were also tending to fragments of ecologies.

I love the way you describe this. I had indeed imagined the gleaning session to be quiet and meditative. But there was giggling and gossiping, and people were finding seeds all the time! I do not want to underrate solitary experience and the possibilities for more-than-human exchanges that may arise when you, for example, immerse in a practice alone. However, carrying out a task like seed gleaning, in collaboration, with a group of people moving their hands in a similar manner, can lead to so much more possibility, as our nervous systems get in sync.

Collaboration is all also about a process of unlearning for me. The kind of courage, compassion, and solidarity with which I see my students collectively reimagining and attempting to restore communities and ecologies is hugely inspiring. It keeps me hopeful. But collaboration is not easy, particularly for those of us educated in capitalist cultures of competition. We have to relearn these things since we have not been taught how. Much of this is DIY, figuring out how to work together. 

What advice would you give to young artists interested in creative ecological research?

Ecology is both about our inextricable connection with the planet and the myriad mind-blowing ways that these connections manifest, across diverse ecosystems. The material, metaphorical gifts of thinking ecologically could be a baseline for all education. It is good that it’s part of artistic research, but for me, ecology should also be part of every way that we imagine the world.

Aside from that, I am interested in artist-ecologist-run schools and institutions that are emerging outside of formal art schools and academia, and which are experimenting with ways of learning that are less locked into neoliberal systems. Often, again, these are very DIY. So much unlearning and re-imagining to be done!

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Find out more about Migrant Ecologies Projects at migrantecologies.org and read our 2020 story on their exhibition Railtrack Songmaps: Roosting Post 2 here.

Header image: A seed gleaning session at the NUS Museum in January this year. Photograph by Kee Ya Ting.