Cleveringa’s “Listening to Trees” series (L2T) is a standout body of work that spans several years, reflecting his deep engagement with environmental themes. This series is a collaborative dialogue between the artist and nature, where trees themselves become active participants in the creative process. Using natural kinetic movements—such as the swaying of branches in the wind—Cleveringa captures mark-making patterns and gestures on surfaces like wood or paper, often with materials such as ink, watercolor, acrylic, or even ironbark sap. Works in the series, like Stroud (2020, acrylic on marine plywood, 360 x 122 x 5 cm) and Currumbin – A Zestful Sun (2022, ink, watercolor, and ironbark sap on 300gsm paper, 46 x 53 x 5 cm), exemplify this method.
However, Cleveringa doesn’t leave these natural imprints untouched. He disrupts the initial marks by cutting, reordering, or reassembling them into new forms. This process symbolizes humanity’s tendency to manipulate and reorganize the natural world to suit its needs, embedding a disrupted communication between humans and nature into the final artwork. The series serves as a metaphor for the human condition—our interconnectedness with the environment, our impact on it, and our attempts to find harmony or impose order. It’s both a critique of anthropocentric behavior and a call to live more mindfully and sustainably.
Links to Paul Feyerabend’s Work
Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) was a maverick philosopher of science known for his critique of rigid scientific methodologies and his advocacy for intellectual freedom. His most famous work, Against Method (1975), argues that science doesn’t progress through a universal, rule-based method but through creativity, rule-breaking, and the interplay of diverse perspectives—sometimes even incorporating non-scientific traditions like art or myth. Feyerabend’s philosophy challenges the dominance of any single framework, promoting a pluralistic approach to knowledge where unconventional methods can yield valuable insights.
In 2024, Cleveringa’s ‘Artist in Conversation’ with Miguel Olmo, hosted by Simon Chan, Art Atrium Gallery, Sydney, whilst exhibiting the “Listening to Trees” series, the artist explicitly recognised Feyerabend as an influence in his arts practice and life. The idea of thinking outside the regular square, experimenting and discovering, is embedded in Cleveringa’s way to knowledge. He has an almost ‘punk type’ attitude with experimentation, philosophy and psychology.
The series resonates with Feyerabendian ideas in several compelling ways and I will eludicate how and even go further introducing other aesthetics. However, despite this, Cleveringa also remains able to ‘hold a pluralistic perspective’ in his practice and life and many artworks hold multidimensional aspects and perspectives if you are willing to look..
• Rejection of Rigid Frameworks:
Feyerabend rejected the idea that knowledge must conform to a singular, rational method. Similarly, Cleveringa’s process in “Listening to Trees” defies traditional artistic norms by letting nature co-create the initial artwork, bypassing the artist’s full control. This mirrors Feyerabend’s embrace of unorthodox approaches over standardized ones.
• Collaboration Across Domains:
Feyerabend encouraged drawing from disparate fields—science, art, tradition—to enrich understanding. Cleveringa’s collaboration with the natural world (trees, wind) as an artistic partner reflects this interdisciplinary spirit, blending ecological processes with human creativity in a way that challenges the boundary between artist and environment.
• Critique of Dominance:
Feyerabend critiqued the hegemony of scientific rationalism over other forms of knowledge. Cleveringa’s act of cutting and reordering nature’s marks can be seen as a parallel critique of human domination over the environment—acknowledging our interference while questioning its consequences, much as Feyerabend questioned the supremacy of scientific authority.
• Creative Freedom and Anarchism:
Feyerabend’s “epistemological anarchism” celebrated creativity over dogma. Cleveringa’s experimental, multidisciplinary practice—using recycled materials, natural movements, and disruption—embodies a similar anarchistic freedom, rejecting conventional artistic hierarchies to explore new ways of seeing and being.
The “Listening to Trees” series doesn’t just document nature; it engages with it as a co-creator, then reflects on human intervention, aligning with Feyerabend’s view that knowledge (or art) emerges from dynamic, unconventional interactions rather than rigid systems. While Cleveringa’s work is rooted in environmental and cultural commentary, its philosophical undertones echo Feyerabend’s call for openness, critique of control, and celebration of pluralistic creativity. Without explicit documentation of Feyerabend’s influence, this connection remains interpretive, but it’s a striking parallel that enriches the understanding of Cleveringa’s art as a boundary-pushing, thought-provoking endeavor.
In addition, Cleveringa’s “Listening to Trees” series, with its fusion of natural collaboration, human intervention, and environmental reflection, offers a rich canvas for philosophical interpretation beyond Paul Feyerabend.
Some other philosophers that come to mind, given this interpretation and his pluralistic perspective which align with Cleveringa’s series of ecological dialogue, its critique of human action, and its existential undertones are below:
Imagine amalgamating and ‘holding’ these various perspectives at once in combination and the viewer who loves aesthetics can begin a deeper journey into his work. Cleveringa once said, though he denies it now, “I hyperconform to the fractured nature of our times.” Was it a pun on nature? Or was it a description of his arts practice?
Let’s see what resonates?:
1. Martin Heidegger – Being and Time and the Concept of “Being-in-the-World”
• Core Idea: Heidegger (1889–1976) emphasized “Being-in-the-world” (Dasein), arguing that human existence is fundamentally relational and embedded in its environment, not separate from it. He later explored technology’s role in alienating humanity from authentic being, as seen in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), where he critiques how modern tools reduce nature to a mere resource (“standing-reserve”).
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”:
Cleveringa’s process of letting trees co-create through natural movements reflects a Heideggerian attunement to being-with-nature, a dialogue that honors the tree’s presence rather than dominating it. The initial mark-making phase suggests an authentic, pre-technological relationship—listening to the world as it is. However, when Cleveringa cuts and reorders these marks, it mirrors Heidegger’s critique of technology: humanity imposes its will, transforming nature into something useful or aesthetically ordered, disrupting its original “being.”
• Why?: This resonates because the series oscillates between coexistence and manipulation, embodying Heidegger’s tension between authentic engagement with the world and the enframing tendencies of modern life. It asks: Can we truly “listen” to nature, or are we doomed to reshape it in our image?
2. Bruno Latour – Actor-Network Theory and We Have Never Been Modern
• Core Idea: Latour (1947–2022), a key figure in science and technology studies, proposed Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which treats non-human entities (like trees or tools) as active participants in networks of relations, not passive objects. In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), he critiques the artificial divide between nature and culture, urging a hybrid understanding of the world.
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”:
Cleveringa’s collaboration with trees—where their kinetic energy drives the artwork—aligns with ANT by granting agency to non-human actors. The trees aren’t mere tools; they’re co-creators, blurring the nature-culture boundary. His subsequent disruption of their marks reflects the messy entanglement of human and non-human forces, a hybrid reality Latour champions over modernist dualisms.
• Why?: The series fits Latour’s framework because it doesn’t romanticize nature as separate or pristine but shows it in dynamic interplay with human action. It’s a microcosm of Latour’s networked world, where trees, wind, ink, and artist form a collective that produces meaning.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus and Rhizomatic Thinking
• Core Idea: Deleuze (1925–1995) and Guattari (1930–1992) in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) reject hierarchical, tree-like structures of thought in favor of the “rhizome”—a non-linear, interconnected web of relations where ideas, beings, and processes spread unpredictably. They emphasize becoming, multiplicity, and deterritorialization over fixed identities or origins.
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”:
The series’ initial phase, with trees marking surfaces chaotically via wind, evokes a rhizomatic process—unpredictable, decentralized, and multiplicitous, resisting a single authorial voice. Cleveringa’s reordering of these marks could be seen as a deterritorialization (uprooting the natural pattern) followed by a reterritorialization (imposing a new artistic form), mirroring Deleuze and Guattari’s cycles of disruption and reformation. The works’ layered, fragmented outcomes—like Stroud’s reassembled plywood—visually echo rhizomatic sprawl.
• Why?: This fits because Cleveringa’s method avoids a linear “artist-controls-nature” narrative, instead embracing a fluid, interconnected process where nature and human creativity intermingle without a fixed center. It’s less about mastery and more about becoming-with-trees.
4. Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition and Vita Activa
• Core Idea: Arendt (1906–1975) in The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes three modes of human activity: labor (sustaining life), work (creating artifacts), and action (initiating change through interaction). She warns of modern society’s overemphasis on labor and work at the expense of meaningful action, which involves engaging with others in a shared world.
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”:
The series straddles Arendt’s categories. The natural mark-making could be labor (a passive recording of environmental processes), while Cleveringa’s cutting and reordering is work (crafting an artifact). Yet, the dialogue with trees and the environmental critique elevate it to action—a call to rethink our shared world with nature. The disruption of nature’s marks reflects Arendt’s concern about human work overpowering the natural conditions of existence.
• Why?: Arendt’s lens highlights the series as a philosophical act, not just an aesthetic one. It’s a gesture toward collective responsibility, urging viewers to reconsider how human activity shapes (or harms) the environment, aligning with her focus on action’s political and ethical dimensions.
5. Merleau-Ponty – Phenomenology of Perception and Embodied Experience
• Core Idea: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) emphasizes perception as an embodied, pre-reflective engagement with the world. He sees humans and nature as intertwined through the “flesh of the world,” a shared materiality that precedes intellectual abstraction.
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”:
Cleveringa’s method of capturing tree movements is a phenomenological act—recording the raw, bodily interaction of tree, wind, and surface before rational intervention. His physical manipulation of these traces (cutting, reassembling) extends this embodiment, merging his own “flesh” with that of the trees. The tactile, material quality of works like Currumbin – A Zestful Sun (with its ironbark sap) underscores this sensory entanglement.
• Why?: Merleau-Ponty’s focus on pre-conceptual experience aligns with the series’ initial openness to nature’s voice, while the subsequent human shaping reflects the inescapable role of perception in reinterpreting the world. It’s a dance between body, nature, and meaning.
So for me, let’s reflect:
Each philosopher illuminates a different layer of “Listening to Trees”:
• Heidegger foregrounds the existential tension between being and manipulation.
• Latour emphasizes the agency of trees as co-actors in a networked reality.
• Deleuze and Guattari celebrate its chaotic, non-hierarchical creativity.
• Arendt frames it as an ethical and political act within human-nature relations.
• Merleau-Ponty roots it in the visceral, embodied encounter with the world.
Why these connections work: The series is inherently philosophical—it’s not just art for art’s sake but a meditation on humanity’s place in the natural order. Cleveringa’s process (collaboration then disruption) and materials (natural and recycled) invite interpretations that wrestle with agency, ecology, and creativity, making it a fertile ground for thinkers who challenge binaries, hierarchies, or anthropocentric norms.
But what about other great critical thinkers that I have left out? What could I write?
What about Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault to name a few. How can they relate to this series of works? Lets now explore further connections.
I dont want to bamboozle my readers too much with this plurality of perspectives and my playfulness.
6. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
Core idea: Sartre, a leading figure in existentialism, emphasized individual freedom, responsibility, and the absurdity of existence in a world without inherent meaning. His philosophy revolves around the idea that humans are “condemned to be free,” constantly creating meaning through their choices and actions (Being and Nothingness, 1943).
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”: Sartre’s focus on human agency resonates with Cleveringa’s process of disrupting nature’s initial marks. The act of cutting, reordering, and reassembling the trees’ gestures could reflect Sartre’s view of humans imposing meaning on an otherwise indifferent world. The trees’ natural movements are raw, unscripted—akin to Sartre’s “being-in-itself” (the non-conscious existence of things)—while Cleveringa’s intervention mirrors “being-for-itself” (conscious human action shaping reality). This tension between nature’s autonomy and human manipulation might suggest an existential struggle to define our relationship with the environment, bearing the weight of responsibility for how we alter it.
• Feyerabend Connection: Sartre’s rejection of preordained essences aligns with Feyerabend’s critique of rigid scientific methods. Both see meaning as emergent from action, not dictated by universal rules—whether in art (Cleveringa’s process) or epistemology (Feyerabend’s anarchism).
7. Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
Barthes, a semiotician and literary theorist, explored how meaning is constructed through signs, texts, and cultural practices. His essay “The Death of the Author” (1967) famously argued that a work’s meaning isn’t fixed by its creator but is open to interpretation by its audience, while Mythologies (1957) decoded how everyday objects and practices carry hidden ideological meanings.
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”: Barthes’ ideas could frame Cleveringa’s series as a text where meaning shifts. The trees’ initial marks are a “script” of nature—raw and authorless—while Cleveringa’s disruptions add a layer of human authorship, only to leave the final interpretation open-ended. This mirrors Barthes’ notion of a work’s meaning being co-created by its viewers, not fully controlled by the artist. The series might also critique the “myth” of human mastery over nature, exposing how our interventions (cutting, reordering) encode cultural assumptions about dominance and utility—much as Barthes unpacked myths in advertising or wrestling.
• Feyerabend Connection: Barthes’ emphasis on multiple readings parallels Feyerabend’s pluralism. Both resist singular, authoritative frameworks—whether it’s the artist’s intent (Barthes) or scientific method (Feyerabend)—allowing Cleveringa’s hybrid process to be seen as a site of interpretive freedom.
8. Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
Foucault, a philosopher and historian, analyzed power, knowledge, and discourse, showing how they shape human behavior and societal structures. Works like Discipline and Punish (1975) and The Order of Things (1966) explore how systems of control—whether institutional or intellectual—organize and dominate the natural and social world.
• Connection to “Listening to Trees”: Foucault’s lens could cast Cleveringa’s series as a commentary on power dynamics between humanity and nature. The act of letting trees “speak” through their marks, only to then cut and reorder them, might reflect Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power—where nature is subjected to human classification and control, much like bodies in a prison or words in a discourse. The series could be read as exposing this power relationship, questioning the “order” we impose on the environment and suggesting a lost dialogue beneath our interventions. It’s less about harmony and more about the subtle violence of reshaping what’s natural into what’s useful.
• Feyerabend Connection: Foucault and Feyerabend share a skepticism of dominant systems—science for Feyerabend, institutional knowledge for Foucault. Cleveringa’s disruption of nature’s “text” aligns with their mutual challenge to hegemonic structures, whether artistic, scientific, or ecological.
Cleveringa’s “Listening to Trees” becomes a rich philosophical playground when viewed through Sartre, Barthes, and Foucault alongside Feyerabend, as well:
• Sartre brings the existential weight: the series embodies human freedom and responsibility in confronting nature’s indifference, choosing to reshape it while grappling with the consequences—a creative act in an absurd world.
• Barthes adds semiotic depth: the trees’ marks and Cleveringa’s alterations form a layered text, open to interpretation, critiquing the myth of human control over nature while inviting viewers to find their own meaning.
• Foucault highlights power: the process reveals how we discipline and reorder the natural world, embedding cultural power in every cut, yet hinting at resistance through the trees’ initial autonomy.
• Feyerabend ties it together with his anarchistic spirit: the series’ unconventional method—nature as co-creator, disrupted by human hands—echoes his call to break rules, blend domains, and challenge orthodoxy, whether in art or science.
Together, these thinkers frame “Listening to Trees” as more than an environmental statement. It’s a philosophical inquiry into how we create, interpret, and dominate—reflecting existential choice (Sartre), textual openness (Barthes), power struggles (Foucault), and creative rebellion (Feyerabend). The series doesn’t just “listen” to trees; it listens to humanity’s conflicted voice within nature, cutting through our own narratives as much as the wood itself.
I could go on, but I believe other writers and thinkers, will.
There’s a mysterious play going on here, one that unravels with time and plays with time itself, a multiplicitous realm emersed under a substrate of disrupted surface, a process artwork, performance, and formality that culminates in a final artefact, disrupted and elegant, as it may be. These artefacts describe our period of time, issues that suround us like climate change, sustainability and technology and our egocentricity and awareness. We are growing in understanding of our changing culture and our position within it.
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Jan Peter Cleveringa is a Sydney-based contemporary multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of global cultural change, sustainability, and humanity’s relationship with the environment. Born in 1969, Cleveringa has built a reputation for his experimental approach, utilizing a variety of mediums such as painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, often incorporating recycled and traditional materials. His academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts (majoring in Psychology and Political Science) from the University of Sydney, as well as studies in painting at Sydney College of the Arts, and a Master’s Degree in Management from the University of Technology, Sydney and he has since received numerous accolades, including the 2019 Eden Unearthed Art Prize and the 2021 Lake Light Sculpture Prize.
Valentine Carrepejg,
Writer & Artist
2024
Jan Cleveringa ~ Artist 