18 Visual Arts Research Volume 48, Number 2 Winter 2022 © 2022 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois mesh/work im/possibilities and inbetweening KEYWORDS: Mothering, post-humanism, new materialism, ecological art, children’s art Making and Mothering in the Mesh/work as Ecological Possibility Every tree is a knot, and the characteristic feature of all knots is that their constitu- tive threads are joined not end to end but in the middle, with trailing ends that go in search of other threads to bind with. Life is a meshwork.—Ingold (2017, p. 35) In the spirit of mesh/work, this visual essay interlaces threads of artistic collaboration that include mother (me) and daughter (Tea), pokeweed and other plants, local light and weather, photographic exposures made with and without a camera, mov- ing from one home to another, old neighborhood and new neighborhood walks, windows, a fashlight, mosses, leaves, bark, fallen petals, dead birds and butterfies, and markmaking. Tis essay breathes across the span of time that my daughter was 3, 4, and then 5 years old. In what follows, “things matter not because of how they are represented but because they have qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and move- ments” (Stewart, 2011, p. 445). Trailing ends coalesce here across a series of mesh/ works—knots of images chronicling and tangling a smattering of vital, if ordinary, threads. My hope is that these threads, these trailing ends, continue searching for ecological possibilities in the feld of art education—specifcally, possibilities that are rooted in attention, rather than based upon place (Hofsess, 2021). 1 Brooke Anne Hofsess Appalachian State University Jayne Osgood Middlesex University London