Jerald Lim: December 2025

Jerald Lim is an artist and scholar exploring the intersections of the ecological, computational, and poetic. Val's work on dualisms has been invaluable to their practice, and Jerald spent time at Plumwood in December, 2025, soaking in her past and continued presence. Read Jerald’s reflection on their residency, as well as some writing excerpts, and poems below.

Jerald and a plumwood tree (photo credit: Morgan Jones, 2025).

I am grateful to the Mountain, and its inhabitants past and present—the Plumwoods (the trees, Val, the Yuin people, the organization and its members, and all other manifestations), Morgan, the birds, bricks, creek, sun, forest, and words—for revelations and quiet that came both in layers like moss eons interwrapped; thank you. Thank you also to Bohie for informing me about and encouraging me to apply to the residency (and thank you COCE2025 for holding space for me to share about my Val-infused poetry and crossing Bohie's and my paths).

Plumwood Mountain summoned me via the citational breadcrumb trail of Val's work on dualisms, but I was enraptured by its Plumwood trees during my week on the Mountain. Growing both up and down from the prehistoric tree ferns that incubate them, their bodies splayed in a thousand and one ways shunted aside my plant blindness to demand my full attention and curiosity. As with my best teachers and mentors, they helped me to further unspool my inheritance of rationality and subservience to linearity.

But the trees also allowed me time to indulge in my originating desires. My admiration and obsession with Val's work deepened as I spent time buried in her library and her notes in the margins of our shared readings, as well as her practice of the everyday (though I did not go for barefoot evening walks in the garden to feed the leeches, nor get the opportunity to follow her detailed instructions on playing host to visiting wombats).

While Feminism and the Mastery of Nature has essentially become a cornerstone of my cosmology and work, it was her thoughts penned with the help of her friends in The Eye of the Crocodile that circled in my mind for most of my stay. In the text, she troubles the inherent bolstering of dualisms in ontological veganism, which she observes continues to maintain the separation of ensouled bodies outside of nature (which animals are elevated into) and the rest of the world, outside of moral consideration and thus usable. Instead she advocates for an ecological animalism where all living creatures are simultaneously food and more than food.

Sunrise from Plumwood Mountain (photo credit: Jerald Lim, 2025).

During my time in the residency, thinking, feeling, and writing flowed like the creek that fed the Mountain and Plumwoods behind the house. In the spirit of the in-the-middle-of of the Plumwood trees, here are some excepts from my writing and reflections on the Mountain, in no particular order:

the sky is spent—stray droplets fall in increasingly esoteric intervals, each one allowed its full repertoire of resounding, triggers the enthusiastic nod of shrub's bedhead countenances. The estate is swallowed in thick fog, resting just at its boundaries from which the towering eucalypts peer out and down from, neither overly intimidating nor protective, simply formidable

a female fairy wren alights atop the bird bath and darts in and out of it for her shower, returning to the lip of the bowl after each dive as if to say "I'm watching—don't even try to sneak up on me!" Perhaps there's the answer of boundaries in some way: this messy tumble in the depths followed by vigilance and quick re-righting; knowing when to leave the bath and not overstay something absorbing; letting the water refill; letting others have their turn; filling the day with other joys

Coming out, I take a detour by Val's grave. The screaming yellow white of the sun is out now and filters through the gap in foliage with a snug exactness. The heavy hands of fern keep her gravestone shaded, but she is already up, at the birds' first number, their number one fan. I turn to look back at the house and it is cast in her golden bask

the watchful tiger snake of the mind—engorged on chunks of structured meaning—I invite you to explore the waters more freely with your sharp sense and agile body

the call to notice, consider, act on, as supported by these trails of golden light—webs woven "out of which we cannot fall"—through expressing with all of the body, padding through life, the forest floor, turning to wisdom in the sounds of our relative birds, the smells of death, the constant presence of self manifesting as other bodies

Sunrise on Plumwood (photo credit: Jerald Lim, 2025).

and a few short poems:

2025-12-02
i am nature's living room
those trees that reach skyward
these insects parachuting onto me
the persistent overlaps of birdsong
the words that remind me

2025-12-04
the trees read with me
i watch their shadowy gaze
the river wishes to write
wrestling the ink tube from
my pen, spins spider webs

2025-12-08
rosella to rosellas' crimson sequence:
plumwood-eyed, leech-marked, creek-
drawn, grave-smelling, bush-weeing,
spider-fearing, lyrebird-learner. a
part of the living library

Plumwoods and ferns in the grove (photo credit: Jerald Lim, 2025).

Wren friend / view from Val’s desk (photo credit: Jerald Lim, 2025).

Thanks for visiting Jerald! Follow more of Jerald’s work over on their website https://jeraldlim.com/ and instagram https://www.instagram.com/jeraldlxz/