Doris Lessing: An Artist's Job.

"I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had—I don’t know what—the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on."

—Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102, excerpted here.

 

 

To Find Stars in Another Language: poetry and the video art of ice.

At this time of year, when we have reached Winter Solstice, the great turning and return of the light, a time of year when, in the midst of the darkest days in the Northern Hemisphere, there are so many celebrations of light, it seems fitting to share with you two creative collaborations about the interplay of light and ice, the interplay between word and image.

Collaboration with the natural world, collaboration with other artists: to me, this is key to growing creativity. Poet Elizabeth Bradfield and video artist Demet Taşpınar teamed up to create three powerful word and moving image creations: To Find Stars in Another Language, Travel of the Light 

and Deliquescence. 

So, take a look: watch Demet's film and listen to Liz's poems in the two videos below. And read my interview with Liz, who was beyond generous in describing their collaborative creative process. Then learn more about both artists through the links in their bios at the end of this post.

Happy Winter Solstice.

To Find Stars In Another Language

Marybeth:  What sparked the idea for a collaboration between you and Demet? Liz:  We were working together on a ship in the Antarctic -- maybe it was the first day, in Chile, when we were checking guests in to the ship and I noticed she had amazing purple streaks in her dark hair which seemed unusual for a ship's doctor, which was her position, and we struck up a conversation and she mentioned she was an artist and I was curious. We talked loosely about the weirdness of being an artist and science-minded, about being inspired by the high latitudes, about why we loved working on boats.... and we talked about possibly doing something together. But I'm a very reluctant collaborator. My work is very deeply personal, and it's hard for me to open it to another voice or vision. Once I saw Demet's films, though, I knew it would be more than ok---it would be inspiring and exciting. Marybeth:  I'm guessing that your work on Broadsided helped you imagine the possibility of a collaboration, right? Liz:  Yes, I think so. I envy the collaborations that I publish on Broadsided, in a way. To see your words refracted by art. To use art as a springboard for inspiration-- much of that is the goal of Broadsided. In fact, Broadsided was in part inspired by seeing art-making in process. I was deeply moved by a residency I had at the Vermont Studio Center, where writers were in the minority. I spent a lot of time haunting the studios of visual artists, and loved being around their energy and art. I think, in part, I started Broadsided to make sure that I kept in touch with visual artists--both the artists themselves and the palpable vitality of their making. Marybeth:  Once you two decided to work together, how did you do it? Liz:  I've tried collaborations in the past, but they haven't quite worked. There was something about the moving image... the dream-state of video and of Demet's subject-less, lyric films in particular that felt like a door into another poetic world that I really really wanted to step through. On the ship, Demet gave me some files to look at. We watched the films together, talked a bit about what both of our visions were. It was very loose--text over the image? alongside it? something else? That was January. It took me a long time until I was ready to look at the videos and engage with them. Summer. July or August. Then I played them again and again, staring at them, trying to invoke (it wasn't hard) a trance-like state. I loved falling into that state. I wrote the poems to the motion and time of the videos. Keeping the final collaboration to voice and image ended up seeming right. Both the video and the poem, I hope, stand on their own. And then they become a different thing altogether upon their conversation. I sent Demet sound files of my reading the poems. We wrestled a bit with technology -- Demet has some better software than I do, and we both have strong opinions about design. After a few email exchanges and Skype calls, which helped us a lot over our language barrier -- Demet is fluent in English, but we communicate better by speech than by email -- we found our place. Marybeth:  What came first, the poem or the video? Liz:  The video. I wrote the poems to Demet's videos. What a rush and release! I had never before set out to write a three minute poem, a nine minute poem.... I had never considered silence and motion as much as in writing to Demet's amazing and evocative videos. I watched and watched her videos, trying to find a voice and story that would pace with them, speak with them. Marybeth:  What have you found are the benefits of collaborating like this? How has it affected your own work, how and what you create, and how you get it out into the world? Liz:  It was so exciting to write to Demet's work. It was a thrill to approach a poem not from my own experience but through the vision of someone else. I don't know that it's affected my own writing in other regards. Perhaps only time will tell. I can't write the kinds of poems I wrote for Demet's videos without their invocation. I love the deeply inward, dreamy, reflective and associative state they put me in. I hope I can do more video-poem collaborations and, in fact, I'm working with another video artist whose work I love. We'll see what happens there. Getting it out into the world -- I'm finding there's a whole community of video-poets I didn't know of. I haven't quite entered into a conversation with them, but I'm lurking on the edge. There's a festival in Berlin, the Zebra festival, that is all video-poems. I'd love to see what they're doing and, at the same time, I'm intimidated. This feels so raw and personal and vulnerable... I'm not sure I'm ready to be in a room full of other people doing similar work. I think I'd be too swayed by their opinions and ideas and right now this feels very personal and private to me as a creative process. Marybeth:  What's next for you two? And what other great collaborative ideas do you have simmering on the back burner? Liz:  I'd love to do more with Demet, but we've both got a chaos of boat work, art/writing work, and personal lives to negotiate. I am hoping that the next time I work on boats for this particular expedition travel company, Demet is the ship's doctor again and serendipity can strike twice.

Travel of the Light

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfrnw72XJSc

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of two poetry collections: Approaching Ice and Interpretive Work. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, The Believer, Poetry, and she has been awarded the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship, among other honors. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod and works as a naturalist and teacher. She is the current Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Demet Taşpınar is a video artist and painter from Turkey, currently studying for her MA in Fine Art at New York University. She has shown work at Art Bosphorus and Canakkale Art Biennale in Turkey, Auto Center in Berlin, and Kingsgate Gallery and the Tate Modern in London. She works as a ship’s medical doctor on expedition ships in Antarctica, the Arctic, and elsewhere, looking and filming and responding as she travels.

Poetry of the Wild: of recycling, nature, sculpture, and words.

Poets and Writers recently featured this project - which is an astonishingly brilliant and effective amalgam of poetry, sculpture, nature, and recycling. What a way to connect people to the places where they live.


From the Poets and Writers feature:

"For ten years ecological artist and sculptor Ana Flores has been bringing "Poetry of the Wild"—a project that combines poetry, visual art, and nature in an effort to connect people to the land around them—to locations both public and wild. Each installation features a box or sculpture, built by artists and community members using recycled materials, that contains an original or classic poem as well as a journal for passersby to contribute reflections of their own."


And here's one of the installations, entitled "It is Born." This poetry box was erected along the Mystic River shoreline during the summer of 2011. The box is by Ana Flores, and it contains the poem "It is Born" by Pablo Neruda.

 

 

It is Born

 

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

Pablo Neruda, from "On the Blue Shores of Silence."

See more of these installations at Poets and Writers and at the facebook page of Poetry of the Wild.

Get inspired. Start a project like this where you live.

Martha Graham: Keep the channel open.

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not hear it.

 

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive."

~MarthaGraham to Agnes de Mille

Gordon Haber, Grace Paley, and Satyagraha.

I hold in my hands an advance copy of Among Wolves: Gordon Haber’s Insights into Alaska’s Most Misunderstood Animal. It feels good to have this tangible evidence of the last few years' of work, feels good to have it be more than words in my head, images on my computer screen. It's here, it's real. Velveteen rabbit come to life.

It’s a different kind of book for me: on it, I’m listed as co-author with Dr. Gordon Haber, a wolf biologist who died four years ago on a research flight. This book was not something I had been looking to do. It simply arrived, a project that needed doing, one that no one else was willing or able to tackle.

At first I resisted it, having plenty of my own projects clamoring for precious writing time. But I wanted this book to exist. I wanted Gordon's forty-three years worth of insights to not disappear, but to reach a greater audience. Because I knew that his insights into wolves need to be heard, now more than ever.
 
Gordon Haber was a scientist, absolutely grounded in hard fact. But he was one who never lost his initial sense of wonder for the subject of his studies: the lives of wild wolves. Having an undergraduate degree in the sciences myself, having worked with scientists as a research assistant and then as a writer, I’ve met all too few scientists who have retained the wonder that first propelled them into their chosen work.

This blog’s link name, “artandnatureand,” points to what happens when art and nature combine – what grows from that. For me and many of those whose work is featured here, this combination often leads to direct activism. Consider Rika Mouw, James Balog, and Mimi White. It's that famous line many attribute to Lenin: “What then shall we do?”

Among Wolves describes a mirror equation: science and nature and – activism. Gordon Haber is best known for his tireless, fearless advocacy on behalf of wolves. Every single bit of his advocacy is grounded firmly in the results of his research, and yet it took that untrammeled wonder, that unbridled passion, to give him the fearlessness to stand up, again and again and again, for what he knew to be true.

It’s so easy to let fear shut us down and close us off from our own unique source of expression, insight, passion. It’s so hard to stay open and fearless, so hard to resist the pressure to be silent and conform. I’ve often thought of each person as a piece in a giant world puzzle: just think what would happen if each of us stayed true to our unique shape, and expressed that unique self into the puzzle we call life.

So I’m always filled with gratitude for those who express what Mahatma Gandhi called satygraha: standing truth to power. I’m grateful for scientists and artists, people in any walk of life, who stand for the truth. It reminds me of something Grace Paley once said when asked if writers had a moral obligation:

“Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have some, too. I mean, why should they get off the hook? Whatever your calling is, whether it’s as a plumber or an artist, you have to make sure there’s a little more justice in the world when you leave it than when you found it. Most writers do that naturally, see that more lives are illuminated, try to understand what is not understood and see what hasn’t been seen. “

Grief/Honor/Gratitude: A Guest Post by Rika Mouw

Welcome to guest blogger Rika Mouw, whose passion for nature and the arts is infectuous, and whose art jewelry made entirely from natural materials inspires a more profound connection to the natural world. And, yes, that's one of Rika's masterpieces on the far right of the blog's banner - a piece about ocean acidification composed entirely from mussel shells.

 

I could not write more perfect words than poet Stanley Kunitz's for my thoughts around what I want to express with my art making: 

 

"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.”

                          ~The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, by Stanley Kunitz

                                          Pearl

 

By the late 1990's, we Alaskans lost 70-80% of the mature spruce forest on the Kenai Peninsula to a spruce bark beetle infestation. I continue to grieve deeply for those lost trees………. and for the ongoing trend of conifer forest die-offs around the world due to warmer temperatures and drought brought on by climate change. These stressing conditions result in trees being more vulnerable and susceptible to increasing populations of varying species of bark beetle. There are dozens of well documented forest die-offs around the world, from western North America (Mexico up to Alaska), Europe, Africa, Australia, and Siberia. The trees are dying in such large numbers, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, spoke of the Western U.S. die off as the West's Hurricane Katrina.

 

The die-offs are now so large and so rapid that it is having an unusual effect on the ecosystem. The whitebark pine, once largely protected from the beetles because it grew at high altitudes and was shielded by cold, is nearing functional extinction in large portions of its range and may no longer be able to feed grizzly bears and other species that rely on its high-fat nut. In Mexico, bark beetles are beginning to kill oyamel fir trees in a rare 139,000-acre biosphere preserve where the majority of North America’s monarch butterflies travel each fall to spend the winter. In 2008, so much of British Columbia’s forests have died they went from being a net carbon sink to a carbon source. While bark beetles attack conifers, now even deciduous trees like the aspen groves in Colorado are dying.

 

Scientists believe the cause is hotter temperatures and drier weather. It’s not only killing mature trees, but the root mass as well. An aspen grove is the offspring of a large single underground clonal mass, when the roots die, groves that are hundreds or thousands of years old aren’t going to be there anymore.

 

From a personal perspective of loss, the absence of the giant spruce trees in our neighborhood, some purported to be the largest on the Kenai Peninsula, gave us privacy and protection……….especially protection from the intrusions of human-generated noise, city lights and neighborhood activities. Before the beetle infestation, our town of Homer had a forest character. There were areas that felt as if we lived in a rainforest. 

 

I watched trees dying at a breathtaking rate, helpless and in disbelief. It was shocking to see how rapidly people were clear cutting their trees and hauling them away, often times before the trees were even 'taken' by the beetles. Once gone, the landscape was transformed, naked and revealing a human footprint I could not have imagined. Climate change came directly to our front door and changed me forever. 

 

 

As the trees on our property were being cut, I saved the bottom sections of the largest trees with the intention of making sculptural pieces that would honor these giants and to pay tribute to a very special habitat lost.

 

As the sections dried, the central core rotted and fell out of each of them, leaving a hole. By standing the stump sections up so their widest diameter faced upwards, they became vessels. I hollowed them to create, giant offering bowls……..female receptacles that speak of Life. Making these 'bowls' has been cathartic, as it is physically demanding and is giving me a chance to appreciate the wood inside, revealing personalities with stories to learn through their growth rings, colors and imperfections.

 

 

As a jewelry maker I tend to see things through the lens of intimacy, preciousness and handing down to the next generation, so each of these tree 'bowls' holds an offering of a piece of jewelry, ceremonial in nature, made from naturally occurring materials in this habitat, evoking the preciousness of the connection and relationship they have with the trees. It is all connected.

The project is ongoing and eventually I will create a 'forest' of these tree bowl offerings to honor the complex living connections in which the trees play such an important role. The greater question will eventually unfold as to whether this will indeed be a forest or an Arlington Cemetery type of grouping………… a life or a death perspective. Either way, an honoring. 

                                            Life Line

 

Simultaneously, I have been committed to another two-pronged landscape project of rehabilitating/healing our land and protecting the wetlands that we live adjacent to. Since the large shade-giving spruce have been lost, my 'gardening' entails staving off invasive weeds and the advance of the tenaciously aggressive grass commonly referred to as Blue Joint (Calamagrotis canadendis) grass that quickly moves in, choking out the former forest vegetation. In our yard that includes species of blueberry and cranberry, cloudberry, bog birch, ferns, Devil's Club, and an array of ground covers and flowering plants. In many incidences in the general landscape, the wave of blue joint grass has not only choked out less aggressive plants but has also impeded new trees from reestablishing, thus creating something close to a monoculture.

 

My slow, methodical hand removal of this grass has allowed a diversity of plant species to remain. After years of nurturing the volunteer birch, mountain ash and spruce trees they are beginning to once again shade out the grass and allow the fern, wild iris, bog orchids, and a number of other species that have sprouted up over the years to thrive as they once did.

 

We live right on the coast of Kachemak Bay and adjacent to a large wetland complex that is habitat for water fowl, moose and even bear. While much of the wetland complex is still intact, with some of it being State designated as critical winter habitat for moose, the rest of it is zoned to be developed for commercial/industrial use.

 

With the knowledge that the best way to heal Nature is to connect it with Herself, over the last 12 years I have focused on protecting the wetlands from further degradation by fighting development proposals that diminish wetland function and partnering with others to purchase parcels from willing private land owners to connect parcels together. Some of these wetland parcels were already filled in and piled with junk so we are cleaning them up and re-wilding what we can with willow and trees.

 

I am repairing, weaving and stitching back together a landscape tapestry from ocean to forest and wetland. Cultivating resiliency. It is an act of love and of gratitude for Life. Climate change is here, there is no question. What can I, as an artist, do? What can any of us do?

 

Perhaps by connecting people of like mind and passion, we can only encourage and support one another for the strength we need to keep doing our work. Just as connecting Nature with Herself gives Her more resiliency, connecting Nature-loving people with others can strengthen our resiliency to continue our work.

 

Rika Mouw is an artist and a passionate advocate for the arts and for the natural environment who lives in Homer, Alaska. Her life is interwoven in these endeavors, often overlapping and becoming one and the same. She earned a degree in landscape architecture and worked for several years in that capacity for a small mountain municipality in Colorado where pedestrianizing the core of the town was a priority. In addition to design, her focus was to prioritize the use of native plant materials and find better ways to integrate the human built environment into the landscape rather than dominate it. Later she turned to the arts, and for the last 25 years, art jewelry has been her primary form of art making. Traditionally, jewelry is a way to express preciousness, beauty, sentiment, celebration and a possession of value to be passed down for generations. Rika's one-of-a-kind jewelry highlights natural materials she finds or gathers that speak to these same ideas regarding the natural environment. More recently her work has become less wearable as she now only references jewelry, using it as metaphor for these expressions in advocating for the precious web of life upon which we are utterly dependent. Her work has been exhibited and collected across the country. The Anchorage Museum and the Pratt Museum in Homer have several pieces of her work in their permanent collections, as well as the National Park Service where one of her works is displayed in the Denali National Park Visitor's Center. She also designed a memorial reading garden for the Homer City Library. Rika has served on the board of Bunnell Street Arts Center since 1998. Recently the Arts Center has spearheaded a community project creating a vibrant waterfront pedestrian district and gateway to Bishop's Beach in Old Town where the Arts Center anchors the neighborhood. Partnering with the City of Homer, the Alaska Maritime Refuge and area businesses, the project is bringing the neighborhood together to calm traffic, improve parking and signage, introduce public art, a People's Garden, artful benches, trails and creating a human scaled gathering place for recreation and cultural events. In the same spirit, her efforts in protecting the natural function of the Beluga Wetland Complex by partnering with others in purchasing parcels for conservation will eventually maintain a natural and vital habitat area in the center of Homer where people can continue to enjoy open space and wildlife viewing.

 

Art, Science, and Extreme Ice Loss.

James Balog: Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss

 

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html

This is an excellent 20-minute Ted Talk by nature photographer James Balog, who speaks here of the importance of combining science with art - how art can inform society about environmental issues like climate change. He also shows and comments on some of his jaw-dropping time-lapse footage of retreating glaciers in several parts of the world, including North America, Greenland, and Iceland. As he points out, ninety-five percent of the world's glaciers outside Antarctica are receding. These time-lapse images are vivid illustrations of the scale of these changes. Watch to the end; it is both beautiful and terrifying.