Robin Wall Kimmerer helps us to understand how humans can be important parts of living systems in our interactions with other living things (Braiding Sweetgrass). Gary Snyder discusses ‘reinhabitants’. Barry Lopez identifies three qualities that are for him critical in indigenous peoples’ ways of living.
…three qualities – paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place… (Barry Lopez, ‘We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight’. High Country News, 1998)
ecoartscotland is looking to commission a response to or reflection on the book Earth Writings. The four practices highlighted all offer very different ways of thinking about art practice from conventional constructions. If you are interested please send a short note outlining your interest with links to two relevant pieces of your own writing to chris [at]fremantle [dotorg] .
Earth Writings (2020) is a richly illustrated arts book of essays, artwork, and exhibition vignettes that explore a range of Irish environments — Bogs, Forests, Fields, Gardens — through four artists creative practices. Written as an invitation to think and act differently about our current earth crises, readers learn how healthier places and worlds can be made through the work of MONICA DE BATH, CATHY FITZGERALD, PAULINE O’CONNELL and SEOIDÍN O’SULLIVAN, artists working in southwest Ireland who, to borrow Donna Haraway’s (2016) words, ‘stay with the trouble’. Scholars PATRICK BRESNIHAN, NESSA CRONIN, GERRY KEARNS and KAREN E. TILL, respectively, engaged with the artists and collaborated to write short essays that reflect upon the artists’ embedded ecological and social practices that make ‘kin in lines of inventive connections’ (Haraway, 2016). Introductions by LUCINA RUSSELL (Kildare County Council Arts Service) and Karen E. Till (Maynooth University Department of Geography), with a short inset of 2019 exhibition images and artist’s statements.
More info at earthwritings.ie
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