Q&A With Louder than the Storm

Hello,

Happy October 1st to you.

I recently took part in a Q&A with Louder than the Storm.

To read the interview please click here

To see my short film ‘Betwixt’ in the online exhibition ‘Intertwine Our Branches’ please click here.

Intertwine our branches is an art exhibition highlighting the importance of climate intersectionality to diversify environmental movements, to challenge inequalities, and show the power of coming together to ensure justice. We have brought together 19 artists across the globe from all different backgrounds talking about how climate change has related to their own personal experience, and their journey to create change through art to inspire positivity and hope. 

From talking about mental health to breaking down gender binaries to challenging colonialism, it is clear that climate change is a human issue which affects all aspects of our lives. Each artist in attempting to navigate these highly complex issues, where it is clear that there is no single solution to climate change, advocates the importance of community, of inclusivity, of being activists as the way to move forward. 

We hope everyone by engaging with the art, attending our events and workshops, submitting their own thoughts and artworks, can become a little more closely connected to the beauty of this earth and support each other to reduce and navigate through the effects of climate change.” - Extract about the exhivition taken from Arts Council England

Joseph Campbell Notes

Notes:

Joseph Campbell: “life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”

Joseph Campbell: there's a lot of magic in the fact that there's so many things you just can't know, can't hold.

-The magic of Death is in transcending the ego. Transcending the ego itself is something most of us can only do occasionally before we slip back into its grasp.

-the white rose represents purification of the desire nature.

Last Night, Dream Post

Last night a lake, a woman, wearing leaves on her face, sat on a silver floating bridge sitting in a shining lake, not bridging anything, but just adrift. She wore beech on her chin, willow on her cheeks, haw on her head, seeds and other leaf debris.

A man that I feel was the presence of my father put his arms around me, his body turned into a prism, all around me, a rainbow then formed from the prism and into the lake, another bridge.

Notes, keywords. Bridge, connectivity, silvering, body of water, leaves, Jungian consciousness, prism, rainbow, graces, emitting light, water, land, masculine and feminine energies, father energy, mother, symbol

Jungian bridge: (WIP research)

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Before going to sleep I was reading about the Miraculous medal and the nun Catherine Labouré in Clark Strand & Perdita Finn’s book ‘The Way of the Rose’, the apparition that appeared to her, she did not believe that it was Mary, but could not quite explain why.

Inanna the Sumerian Queen of heaven.

The back of the miraculous medal central image monogram.

The central image is a monogram: the letter M with a crossbar through the middle supporting an upright cross. Bizarrely, and completely unremarked upon by modern scholars, the lower half of that symbol turns out to be the cuneiform word for Inanna, the Sumerian “Queen of Heaven”. The first cuneiform tablets were not translated until much later in the nineteenth century, and so there was no way Catherine, even if she had been educated, which she most definitely was not, could have understood what she had seen. - page 204

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –

so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.”

― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

Thoughts on Becoming, Paper as Medium and Animals

The process the paper has undergone, it has transformed, from seed in the soil to tree to pulp to paper, to printer, the life is transformed, metamorphosised and then discarded. As the human-animal, this is what we do, every day, to many animal, plant, mineral and elements.

"Our culture values product. We live in a culture that has very little understanding of - and therefore little value for process." BK Loren

Newspapers possess the most ephemeral quality of all reading materials. I collect my newspaper from inside a shed belonging to shared living accommodation where all the residents all over the age of sixty and staunch recyclers. They place many newspapers inside the recycling bags. I do not have to purchase papers due to this reason, as it is so readily created and I can find it here for free once used and has no longer given value to it, it is a quick turnover from being manufactured, sold, bought and discarded, much like cardboard and plastic packaging on many products.

Given that paper is so easily attainable, and open to being transformed, it's own becoming through imagination and hands through a process of adding moisture, has been seen throughout the centuries and repeatedly more recently in acknowledgement to political and social disturbance.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Haiti-Jacmel-papier-mache-parade-180962549/

"But nature can never be a thing. Unlike any object created by humans, nature is always in process. It never is. It is constantly becoming. When it stops becoming, it transforms into not - nature. Then, it is sheer object ( a tree = a chair, an element = a bomb). And in our mainstream culture, objects are either used or discarded." BK Loren

If we are to remove process in nature, we remove a dreaming, a becoming, from our bodies, and the bodies of otherness. You can still have a process through mechanism, but the output or ending is determined. There is no discovery, or rather shedding in certain mechanistic reproductions. We as humans, non-humans and nature are phenomena that shed our interior selves, which alternates and cocreates the variety and shape of physical existences, realms going outwards through spiralling time.

The space between the hand and the eye is sometimes called 'the magic space' where psyche or as Hillman writes 'container' and imagination come into play. When tuned in our containers Hillman describes that we are opening up to our wounds and afflictions, with the grief of ongoing species degradation and a sense of loss, witnessing acts of becoming are hugely consoling, art is connected to social change, and a revival of repurposing materials, which in turn reflect a time of how slowing down is detrimental for ongoingness of life. Repurposing what we have as opposed to consuming new is a minor disturbance in the system, a minor disturbance in a mechanised system of waste discarding process and of consumption of new.

Paper is prolifically produced, discarded and recycled and resold cheaply and most today do undergo several generations of a process of recycling through machine. Paper was once imported from Asia, and mills to produce paper by hand survived in Britain until the industrial revolution.

Papermaking is associated with craft and recycled paper making has recently had a resurgence due to the easy obtaining of paper materials. Those who do seem to continue to re-make by recycling paper by hand sometimes add elements to the paper, such as scent, seeds, flowers and natural dyes, in this process the paper seems to take on an unexpected character of its own, due to the cellulose contained within it.

It rather resembles more of what its plant life existence was before in texture. I am choosing to recycle the paper but into a three-dimensional form with which I often have the intention to take on the shape of some animal form. The tearing and deconstructing and remaking, emerging shapes that change depending on water, salt and air, once dry I paint them, just enough that the original printed script still shows, revealing, as I feel the act of newness is not detrimental. I am not attempting to present an entirely shifted object with unrecognisable origins, but more to show that it has gone through a re-making, a process that is not quite finished, to celebrate process, but also, in turn, rethink it, reclaim it and relearn it.

Nature, soul and time spirals, it is not a single straight line, it goes in circles and unexpected motions, curlicues and turns like that of a tree. Paper has its own sort of disobedience too if you go against the grain of it, I discovered this whilst making pages for a handbound book with my bone folder, the paper informs you by resistance until you go with the grain, the paper continues to push, and many creases and lines are emitted from the intended fold. Paper, being a cellulosic material meaning the containing of microorganisms, these shift, or dissolve in water, a process that makes recycling paper by hand entirely possible.

The term papier-mâché can be roughly translated as “chewed paper,” presumably because the original paper becomes destroyed to a certain extent (DeVoe 1971). The slowness of formation, the forms of papier-mache develop at its own speed, a process that adheres to the element of air due to the adage of the element water.

Drying time depends on the overall atmospheric conditions if left solely to. This can be a slow process, which requires time and patience. The overall end effect is also an unfolding of sorts, much like a body, wetness in this new becoming, like birth and gradual shrinkage, thinness like that discovered in the ageing process. Kiki Smith, artist of papier-mache "Hard Soft Bodies" (1992) expressed a preference for "Materials that don't have much significance to power."

"Her work illuminated how much paper is like skin, at once frail and robust, susceptible to puncture and able to weather the years. The act of using paper-mâché itself can be read as a pantomime of caring for such bodies: bandaging the skinned knee, wrapping the corpse." - NewYorkTimes The overall outer exterior of layered papers can resemble that of skin, and such as skin, degrades and weathers over time. Porous and impermanent, unlike gold or metals.

"The cause of our suffering is ignorance, a false way of looking at reality, Thinking the impermanent is permanent that is ignorance. From ignorance is born greed, anger, fear, jealousy and countless other sufferings. The path of liberation is looking deeply at things in order to truly realise the nature of impermanence, the absence of a separate self, and the interdependence of all things. This is the path that overcomes ignorance. that is true liberation." ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Kiki Smith - Hard Soft Bodies

Thought Zine, Notes & Umwelten

My body is your body.

My body came from your body.

Once my heart was inside my mother's body.

Now it sits approximately five feet six above your body ~

~ Biosemiotics - A recognition that communication, interpretation and meaning-making are not limited to human life, but to all life everywhere.

~ Learning to listen to the myriad of other voices beyond the human.

“Biosemiotics, which bridges the sciences and the humanities, is a new field of study and a new way of understanding the world. It takes its name from bios (Greek for life) and semeion (Greek for sign). Its central insight is that all living organisms experience their world through signs which they must make sense of, or interpret. In other words, all organisms are in a communicative relation with their semiotic worlds, and these worlds are full of other forms of communicative semiotic life. Biosemioticians refer to these semiotic worlds as umwelten (plural of umwelt, or semiotic environment). They consist of all the sign relations which species’ evolution has made relevant to the organism’s meaning-making.

For example, many birds and insects see at the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum, where humans do not. Their umwelt, in other words, is slightly different. For humans, the cultures they have made are relevant to their existence as humans, and these exist – as living ideas, artefacts and technology – interwoven with the human umwelt of nature. There is an underlying reality, but every species has evolved to experience it in the way that is most useful for that species’ life and survival.” - Wendy Wheeler, extract from In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss

You can find the full script here >>>>>

https://modernforms.org/blog/colourful-speculation/

“Both nature and culture grow from the same evolutionary source. Whether we are super-aware of it or not, we are all influenced by the communicational feedback loops that flow between selves and natural and cultural environments. When meanings (or functions) go wrong at any point in these sense-making circuits, all our living systems fall into potential danger. So what are we doing to ourselves and the planet when we allow this ceaseless slippage of natural and cultural meanings that starts to dismantle the life of our worlds?” - Wendy Wheeler