I had the pleasure of interviewing my friend and colleague Corey Hardeman, as part of my research on the 25th of August this year. I recently posted a link to our talk on my Facebook artist page. However, realising that I have a great many friends and acquaintances who does not follow my page, and whom I think will find this discussion very interesting, I thought that I would share the link here as well. It is a fairly long video, of just over an hour. But if, like Corey and me, you find yourself in a time and place where the climate crisis is taking up an increasingly larger position in your life, work and worldview, you may find this interesting. Here is what I have learned from our discussion. As a painter, as a woman and as a partner, mother and caregiver: Our creative practices are both material and spiritual in nature. While we engage with painting on a purely material level, using pigments from the earth, cloth, and wood, we simultaneously find ourselves channelling a creative force that exists beyond ourselves. Timothy Morton refers to this as ecorhapsody, in his book Ecology without Nature. It is the work of art in our time to capture the atmosphere, the memory and beauty of places that may not be here much longer. In this way, the physical act of painting may become a coping mechanism for dealing with our climate grief. Simultaneously, as we engage in an attentive (mindful) creative practice, we enact a practical manifestation of a lived ethic of care, as described in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. Considering these extrapolations, we may reasonably understand that the creative practice may be interpreted as an Ecological Aesthetic of Care. I hope that you will enjoy this interview: Categories All
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A Grievable Life...
To live in this world You must be able To do three things: To love what is mortal; To hold it against your bones knowing Your own life depends on it; And, when the time comes to let it go To let it go ~ From In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver . I last visited the pond at the end of April 2022, I wrote a piece about how this body of water has become my Blackwater pond and posted a few photographs which attempted to capture it’s beauty. Amongst these milkwoods was my old acquaintance, the tortoise tree of which I wrote last year upon our happy reunion. (The Source). This place is at it’s most beautiful in mid-winter (now) when the arum lilies are in flower and the fresh green growth protrude through the marshy water. At this time all the old limbs of the milkwoods are draped in mossy velvet. Their idiosyncratic and sometimes cantankerous likenesses are rendered wonderous, and the stillness of this respite permeate the entire forest. When I left here at the end of April it was not without a sense of anticipation for the wonders I might find here on my return in winter. Today I went for a walk in the forest in the late afternoon. It soon became clear, that some work had been done, and were likely to continue. I wonder if they are going to build a boardwalk here, my daughter mused. I felt the hard egg of anxiety drop heavily. As I went through the entrance to the pond my heart sank. Heavy work boots had been through here. The arum lilies laid trampled. The canopy seemed thinned. There were very little green, everything seemed bleak and washed out. As I arrived at the tortoise tree, I realised that the overhanging limbs had been trimmed. The tree is still there, perhaps even a little relieved. The tortoise-like branch was not… It lay a little way to the side, dead, brown, discarded, not even a tuff of moss in sight. It had gone the way of all ephemeral things. The workforce had been there and with majestic efficiency had completed the municipal contract. They had trimmed overhanging, branched which could pose a threat to hikers’ safety. Men doing their work, to put food on the table. They had taken care to provide care. These trees are protected* and the dead and dying limbs must be trimmed. The best time to do this is in winter. The lilies will grow back. In time the canopy will close again. New growth will sprout from old branches. Yet my old acquaintance will not return. I have more than enough photographs of this branch. I could revisit the memory of the encounter at any time, by reading the piece I wrote. I know all things are ephemeral… Yet one question lingers. Can one grieve for a severed branch? What constitutes a grievable life? *This stretch of milkwood forest is part of the Fernkloof Nature reserve and is a protected area. This section provides a microenvironment rich in biodiversity. Special permission is needed to prune milkwoods in terms of the National Forest Act. I stumbled across a phrase by Donna Haraway yesterday, which upset me and made me think hard. It has been germinating in my mind and has opened so many avenues of thought and it is merely six words, but it might have changed my outlook on e v e r y t h i n g : “we [feminists] continue to inherit the trouble.” Hidden away at the end of a chapter in a note about Robert Young’s Darwin’s Metaphor, and probably a phrase many other women / academics / feminists have come across often and even used frequently, yet it opened in me an avalanche.
Why did I react so violently to this phrase? The cause if two-fold (and there might be even more unfoldings to come, but let’s start here): On the one hand I have been living an especially brutal reality since the start of the year, I have been sharing my life with a husband who have been in some or other form of unbearable pain since the last day of last year. Simultaneously I am a part of a group of woman friends, my coven, who have been especially good at listening, supporting and holding space for each other. Without them I would have given up the ghost months ago. One of these friends shared an exceptionally poignant YouTube sketch on menopause last week. Amongst the many truths the one woman in this video said: “ Women are born with pain built into them. It is our physical destiny, period pain, sore boobs, childbirth... you know; we carry it within ourselves throughout our lives, men don’t. They have to seek it out; they invent all these gods, and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things , which is something we do very well on our own... and then they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby... and we have it all going on in here, inside, we have pain on a cycle for years and years and years...” anyway you get the drift – you can watch the whole clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZrnHnASRV8 So, pain, yes, we have inherited it, and we carry it well, and men don’t. BUT having lived through the absolute shitshow that has been the past 3 months, fully realising that I am only able to survive this because I am a privileged white woman, who have inherited the means to survive these storms from her colonist ancestors. This realisation has opened avenues of thought around pain and privilege which hitherto have been knowledge but not yet lived experience. I realise today, that had any other woman have had to endure these trials and tribulations she, her children, elderly parents and everyone else who rely on her for life, sustenance and wisdom, likely would not have survived, well certainly not intact. So apart from the pain I inherited I am deeply indebted to the privilege I have inherited, without it I, my spouse and offspring would have been lost months ago. I am equally ashamed that it has taken me this long to realise that if any other woman, without my white skin, my family’s means, whether in my own country, or in North America, the Middle East, East Asia, Australia, anywhere have had to live through this, the outcome would be far more serious than emotional outbursts on social media. It might take a village, but the economical state of the village still dictate the outcome. I might be a feminist, but I am absolutely aware that I am a white feminist, I have truly little idea of the struggles of Black, Indigenous and Asian feminists, but I am willing to learn, and if at any point I can, I am willing to help. On the other hand, and this is my main field of interest, I am thinking hard about the ecological trouble we have inherited: My earliest recollection of hearing about the environment was in 1982, at the age of 7, when my mother told me about acid rain. Up until this age my main concern had been dealing with the usurper who joined the family 3 years earlier, but a younger sister were soon to become the least of my concerns. My mother explained to me how the rivers and lakes in America and Europe have been getting increasingly more acidic and therefore unable to support aquatic life. She showed me how buildings and statues were being dissolved as well, which in retrospect didn’t make such a big impression on me. She did her best to console me as to how we here in Africa were safe, all the trouble were happening north of the equator. A few years later in 1985 it was the hole in the ozone layer, again it was my mother who relayed the knowledge, because mothers tell the stories. The concern were far greater now, because this hole was over Antarctica, in the Southern hemisphere and practically in our backyard. I recall asking her why they (her generation) kept inventing things which are damaging the world, and what would be left when I was grown? This was the trouble we inherited; it is the very same trouble my children are inheriting. I recall my mother saying to me that it was the people from the Northern Hemisphere, the seat of progress and industry, who were inventing the damaging stuff, it wasn’t us, we were innocent bystanders receivers of the fallout, if not consumers of the goods... My mother very effectively succeeded in removing us from our European roots, in my mind at least. My mother loved history, as do I, and a few years later in the mid 90’s when most of us awoke from the blissful slumber, my mother researched the family histories, both her own and my fathers, and with equal measures of shock and fear conferred on me the knowledge of our colonist roots – the one branch part of the French Huguenots who fled France in 1688 the other Germans who settled here before 1660. Undeniable European roots. These settlers left the European continent before the age of Enlightenment which brought the male modernist paradigm of progress and man’s dominion over nature. All of them most likely had to learn to live from the land, if only they would have listened to the knowledge of the Indigenous people the trouble that we inherited might have been less grave. This is our history; it is shared, and it is terrible, and it is undeniable. Shared histories and lived experience two equally explosive terms. The one is not better nor worse than the other, both run the danger of lapsing into cliche. Both amount to the same thing: the trouble we inherited, the trouble we keep inheriting. Both begs the same question: What shall we do? At the moment, I don’t know. I think we need to think hard, to keep thinking hard. We will make mistakes, we will say or think of something, which will hurt someone somewhere, we must take response-ability for these mistakes, by acknowledging them, and then by working together to counter them, and then we must think again. And we will likely repeat this process many, many times, but hopefully somewhere we will find a solution, a way to heal the damage, so that in a few decades our children might inherit new (better) trouble. |
AuthorLaurette de Jager is a Visual Artist working with the Ephemeral Nature of Things, in the hope of finding new ways of existing in a dying Archives
October 2023
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©2022 by Laurette de Jager
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