Description:

Nature Keeps Score: The Climate Emotional Spectrum is a participatory design project that explores how we experience and express climate anxiety. As emotional distress rises alongside ecological collapse, this project offers a quiet space to feel, reflect, and connect, not by fixing emotions, but by making room for them.

The climate crisis is both a cause and symptom of disconnection, between people, nature, and emotion. Climate change isn’t just an environmental crisis, it’s an emotional and intergenerational one. Just as ecosystems hold scars, we inherit climate emotions: grief, hope, fear, and resilience. This project asks: What if nature itself was a mirror for these emotions? Using natural materials, data, and design, it turns invisible feelings into visible forms, helping people see their emotions as valid, evolving, and shared.

The project consists of five interconnected outputs:
* Rings of Record - Painted tree ring cross-sections mapping climate emotion data from young people globally.
* Extinction Ledger - A layered record of biodiversity loss, where pressed flora and ecological data trace the weight of disappearance across Aotearoa’s landscapes.
* Ingrained Grief - A quiet work where bark fragments carry climate quotes and reflections, revealing how loss and memory live within collective emotional experience.
* Pressed in Time - A participatory series where climate emotions are imprinted onto wood canvases using hand-carved stamps, charting a shared journey through the Emotional Climate Spectrum.
* Radiant Acts - A circular painting of climate wins, designed to balance the emotional spectrum with stories of hope and action.

Natural materials, bark, seed paper, wood, and dried flora root the project in texture, time, and place. Each output is intentionally soft and inviting, offering slowness and care in contrast to the urgency that often defines climate communication, and the AI-fuelled pace reshaping design and creative production. The process was guided by the Māori principle of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and trauma-informed design approaches.

The work was shaped through workshops with high school and tertiary students, who contributed emotional reflections, climate stories, and stamped their feelings into a shared record. In response, native trees were planted through Trees That Count, a small act of regeneration woven into the experience.

Nature Keeps Score invites viewers to move through emotion, not around it. It validates feeling, honours grief, and encourages quiet courage. It also recognises that emotional awareness, when paired with meaningful action, becomes a catalyst for change. As emotions shift and settle over time, the project gently asks: What might they shape next?