Sensitive, gentle, unapologetic. Using particularly captivating, native, handcrafted, understated jewellery. Elayna Toby Singer is a multidisciplinary environmental teaching artist and creative catalyst in the USA whose work lives between art, nature, and community, deeply aware of how aesthetics and green spaces shape our neurological, emotional, and physical well-being.
Recognised as “The Natural Artist” by South Florida Gay News in its annual OUT50 feature of LGBTQ+ leaders, activists, businesspeople, and artists, Elayna Toby has also received the First Place People’s Choice Award for Outdoor Sculpture at the International Kinetic Art Biennial -twice- for her community-created CommuniTree kinetic art installations in trees. CommuniTree nature-based neuroarts interventions include workshops, guided walks and community-driven, site-specific public art for well-being.
She collaborates with government agencies and artists to design, fabricate, and install public art in parks, plazas, buildings, streetscapes, and gardens, projects that highlight community stories, strengthen the sense of place. She has led interactive “heal mobile” programs for cancer survivors, sexual abuse victims, and veterans in South Florida and Mexico.
FTHub Forest Therapy Practitioner after Summer School Barcelona, Elayna is recognised for her leadership in public art and her ability to bring creativity into shared spaces: gardens, parks, and cultural institutions.
“For a lot of years growing up, I had the good fortune of living next to and in the backyard of a big weeping willow tree, a beautiful weeping willow, and it was just like a sacred, special, magical place to be under all the time. And going away for summer camp. Later in my career of working at arboretums and botanical gardens, there have been a lot of really special trees and places that I enjoyed.
“I began my career as an educator in multicultural education, which got me into cultural anthropology, which got me into this aha moment of the universals of culture. Plants are universals of culture. All people all over the world rely on and commune with, and connect with plants.
“Plants are elemental to life; food, clothing, shelter, medicine, music, ritual, building materials. All around the world, all people over all time, we have had relationships with plants. Our foremothers and forefathers were much more connected; plants were much more part of our lives. So from there, I pivoted to what ended up being a 15-year career and having a master’s degree”.
“I’m a Longwood Fellow from Longwood Gardens, developing and running public gardens, cultural nature places for people to come and be in nature and learn and be inspired and be restored. It was always the multicultural uses of plants and education, and empowering people to take care of plants to take care of themselves.
“Once I started, I was a jeweller as an artist. I was making earrings, but when I was working in the gardens full-time, I started to collect seeds and pods and branches. And that’s when I made my first mobile, my first mobiles, my kinetic art.
“I work with the wind. I work with trees. I work with the community. I work with place, honouring place and connecting people with themselves and place and nature. And I use the mobile making process as a metaphor for cultivating balance for ourselves and for the environment”.
“I was involved in the arts in the gardens—outdoor art exhibitions, indoor art—all nature connection. All the content was nature. But I had this shift within the equilateral triangle of heritage, culture, art, and environment, with health and well-being. And now for the last 21 years, I’ve been in my full-time employment working for a county here in the States, Palm Beach County, as the director of art and public places. I create places with artists as part of architecture, parks, plazas, convention centres, libraries, and community centres. My work has always been in aesthetics. And the science and the neuroscience are very much part of the work that I do in my personal work”.
Nature therapy
“As it relates to forest therapy and nature connection, it’s in my personal work that, in addition to the mobile making, I involve breath, movement, and singing. Within that context, I do workshops and also large-scale public art of my own, community-created work, and community engagement. A project empowering people to cultivate more balance for themselves and for the environment. We collect native seed pods locally wherever I am in the world, local materials. It is an opening to talk about our own nativity, where’s our home, where do we feel at home, that sense of belonging, connection to place, which so many of us don’t have.
“Some people have a readily available answer, and others don’t, but through prompts in the experiences that I offer, and with the tools from the FTHub method, building on my own practice, people are engaged. A key pivot for me was to be not only an educator, as an educator I’ll always be, but also to facilitate empowerment, transformation, action orientation, and behavioural health. Very connected.
“Nature is really elemental to the work that I have done my whole life. Nature connection is my jam. If we care, we share. It’s about getting people to pivot from just education to behavioural change in their yard, in their community. This is really about arts, nature, and health. It’s like neuro arts, the recognition that when we do creative experiences in nature, all those health benefits appear.
“From my previous context of the didactic guide -“this is this plant, this is how it’s used”- this work is different. This is not technical. This is a connection. Aesthetics heal. Neuroaesthetics is now documenting how we respond. We come from the trees, from the green. The way green affects us in our neuro, it’s neuroscience. And there’s also the way aesthetics affect us; beauty versus grey, generic. That environment is detrimental to our physical and emotional well-being. So I definitely appreciate that being brought out.
“Through creative multi-sensory activities and temporary public art tree installations, community members experience the positive mental health and wellbeing benefits of connecting with trees and their own ‘tree-ness’. Engaged in imaginative, gentle movement, mindful breathing, song, tree memories and self-reflection, individuals experience increased calm and renewed hope”.
“The word connection is what I want to bring out. A lot of the work I do is metaphorical and helps people through metaphor connect with concepts. Empowerment is also about behavioural change for self and environment, to help reduce climate change. People are more anxious about climate change, and this gives them concrete actions to take care of themselves and to make a positive impact”.
“So connection—connection of objects, connection of working together, community, connection to nature. I feel like I’m a link, a bridge. That’s elemental to my approach”.
Ph: Courtesy Elayna Toby Singer & FTHub
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