Physical traces: Aesthetics of care and the picturebook as a nature/culture product

While publishers, educators and academics have been grappling with the impacts of digital media on children’s publishing, another trend has quietly emerged on bookshelves in the children’s section of the library. Ironically, given print picturebooks’ once-prophesised extinction, their very haptic qualities of the paper picturebook have surged, with trade publishers making concerted efforts to emphasise the medium’s materiality. From a wider range of textured paper stock to increasingly sophisticated paper engineering techniques, and the use of vegetable-based inks that emanate a patent scent, the picturebooks in our children’s hands have become extraordinary, material story objects. The reasons behind enhanced materiality in a digital age are not merely aesthetic or market driven. This paper contributes to the existing research on picturebook haptics by thinking through their presence in the context of rising climate catastrophe and ecoanxiety. We suggest the materiality of such works have the potential to present a posthuman challenge beyond the digitisation of children’s literature. We argue the ‘thingness’ of a printed picturebook can offer children an encounter with the more-than-human. That is, while a child engages in the narrative world of their book-as-object, they are also engaging in an embodied and embedded subjectivity consistent with Josephine Donovan’s conceptions of an aesthetics of care: one that is literal, agentic, materialist, entangled and vitalist, firmly grounded in a specific sense of place and the lived experience of the other. Further, we situate these theoretical interrogations within reflections on making and practice, and the limitations and challenges present in this pursuit. To innovatively embody the I-Thou aesthetic of care Donovan advocates, we collaborate on this discussion from the subject positions of an ecocritical reader and eco-motivated creator-illustrator to consider the meaning making and sustainability of our relationships with the non-human in the material, visual and verbal modalities of the 2012 award-winning picturebook The Boy Who Grew Into a Tree .