ABSTRACT. This creative essay comes out of the Pākehā Project wānanga, an immersive learning space in Aotearoa New Zealand where Pākehā (non-Māori settlers) are invited into relational inquiry with colonial history and Tiriti-based futures. Drawing, story and embodied encounter are part of how we stay with collective trauma, without rushing to resolve it. Through oil pastel sketches, smudged islands that dissolve even as they form, I explore the notion of ‘islands of coherence’ (after Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), fragile sites of emergent order that can ripple through systems and reshape them. The piece moves between grief and mischief, doctrine and desire. It traces how trauma and eros pulse through the same nervous system. Mischief in the sacristy, the eco–erotic embrace of a fig tree and the press of kahikatea trunks against labouring bodies all become moments of coherence, glimpses of relation. As a Pākehā artist and therapist, I ask how creative practice can hold us inside entanglement, sending language back into the dark (Cameron-Lewis & Mika, 2024) so that what remains is breath, bark and relation: an ecology of desire.

 

Keywords: settler colonialism; embodied knowledge; Pākeha identity; creative arts practice; relational inquiry; decolonisation

 

How to cite: Gordon, R. (2026). Bark against my back: Ecologies of desire. Knowledge Cultures, 14(1), 46–54. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc14120263

 

Received October 3, 2025 • Received in revised form February 19, 2026

Accepted February 19, 2026 • Available online April 1, 2026