Abstract Microscopy is a valuable tool for deepening our understanding of, and intimacy with, soil. This article explores how the author’s own soil microscopy practice, and those of other research-creation practitioners, demonstrate a methodology for both soil knowing and strengthening human–soil intimate relations, arguing that soil microscopy may break down the sense of separation from the foodweb. Soil microscopy may thus usher in one’s own felt sense of participation in what anthropologist Kristina Lyons describes as soil’s “vital decomposition” and ecophilosopher Val Plumwood describes as “being prey.” Through intimacy with soil’s difference, one may feel one’s own internal difference and better return to the world as entangled, holobiontic participants. Where artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth use an audiovisual sensory gestalt to make the foodweb felt, the author’s own research-creation practice evidences the capacity for microscopy to do the same. The author also takes a different approach to many of her contemporaries by using a larger field of view than is common in artistic microscopy to meet soil as an ecosystemic entity.
Sophia Dacy-Cole (Sun,) studied this question.