Tuning Into the Anthropocene: An Aesthetic of Grief

“Our principle spirit work is a response to the troubles of the times; not freedom from the troubles of the times. Freedom from these kind of troubles is truancy, not freedom” 

- Stephen Jenkinson

Today, in the midst of the 6th mass extinction and extreme wealth inequality, beings world-wide contend with the impacts of the Great Acceleration. Naturally, many of us are reckoning with our relationship to place, materiality, and voice as the consequences of unsustainable lifestyles and ideologies loop back to meet us in the shape of global warming. 

What is the obligation of an artist working today? How do we make meaning, let alone, sense of these times? I wonder, in an era when we must scale back, can we find sanctuary within limitation? I believe the answer to these questions has to do with our capacity to stay with the trouble, as multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway says. “Staying with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures.” (Haraway, 2016)

In this essay I offer my artwork, insights and observations about the role of grief work in the search for meaning-making amidst socio-ecological crisis. Amidst my artworks is an undercurrent of influence stemming from geographic, academic, exploratory, and observational origins. These experiences shape the way in which ecological and emotional questions intersect. My perspective is a consequence of my encounters growing up in Northeast America. As a european-American on the receiving end of upper-middle class prosperity, I’m quite sure that my ancestors fixated on personal growth and accumulation to secure the livelihood of their kin. Yet today, my brother and I are fixated on scaling back, letting go, and taking lessons from indigenous and post-colonial perspectives. 

I am a “formally trained” visual artist. But I also have a background in the healing arts. This is because I felt that my institutional training fell dramatically short of addressing meaning-making in a time such as ours. In my final years studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, I couldn’t make sense of why I was making art. I was wreckoning with a crisis of futility. So after school I hit the road to study under vagabond poets, culture activists, healers, and farmers to secure insight on the spirit work of our time. After gaining some perspective, I realized the wisdom in orienting yourself towards the trouble; towards the elephant in the room. It is through this discovery that an aesthetic of ecological greif, repair, and praise emerged in my artwork. Or rather, re-emerged. I was able to shed new light on the brooding, moody angst and passion I felt as a young teen growing up in a culture seduced by material distraction and blind to its impact. I finally had the courage to openly accept that everything is not okay. More importantly, I understood that showing up to feel what is wrong is important work that is easily put-off in a culture of distraction, deflection and denial. In light of this I wonder, if we don’t show up to feel what is wrong, are we necessarily entertaining delusion? 

Paying attention is worthy to examine who does and does not have the tolerance for discomfort and precarity in this atmosphere; to who does and does not have the tolerance to stay with the trouble. Who among us opens their ears and eyes to what is going on? And what mindsets, or lifestyles, make it possible to not perceive what is going on? It seems my culture has a hard time accepting endings, limitations, and ephemerality. We are stead-fast oriented toward linear progress and I believe this is connected to a fear of death. It seems possible that many of our actions and accelerated pace is grounded in a place of denial of what is happening around us.

I wonder about wealthy, developed nations such as mine: at what point does the wayward drive toward progress recognize encroaching limitations? As Timothy Morton notes, “Global warming is a symptom of industrialization and industrialization is a symptom of massively accelerated agriculture.” (2016) My piece A Culture of Fire, is a reflection on industrial acceleration. Working men heave with strength and might in an industrial landscape, while unbeknownst to their efforts, a body of water emerges from a subtle explosion or breakage in the background. 

A Culture of Fire, 2017-2019

4ft by 5ft, Newspaper and mixed media on wooden panel

Building on this reflection, I notice we are in too much of a rush to take a pause and take stock of the environmental shifts happening around us. For those paying attention, it is becoming increasingly evident that the modern capitalist project doesn’t have solid ground to stand on. Amends have not been made for historical and ongoing tresspasses. The soil, no longer fertile, is haunting. It carries the aches and cries of un-acknowledged dead. In light of this atmosphere, my painting, Ancestor of Maize, uses motifs of the corporeal, ancestry and agriculture, as well as the celestial and the underground to articulate a sense of human and earthly co-existence for the sake of making amends. 

I believe there is a broken-ness we must respect about the modern American lifestyle. Respect, so that we might become response-able. That is, able to respond. Able to engage different ways of being in and relating to the world. Now, as ever, I believe we must ask ourselves: What is the consequence of our actions? 

Ancestor of Maize, 2018-2019, 

7ft by 12ft, Ink on linen

The answer is grim, no doubt. But before we move on to the latest tik-tok video, can we take a pause here? Can we let the consequences of our actions sink in and shape us? Have a consequence on us? It is not an easy thing to sit with, I will give you that. But I feel there is a diamond to be found in the ruff here. 

By orienting toward socio-ecological disrepair, we are likely to meet despair. However, I believe this is necessary groundwork to render a person capable of mobilizing toward learned, livable futures that are rooted in reciprocal ecologies. Further, such response-ability has the potential to authentically remedy a crisis of futility for the individual and cultivate pathways of creative resilience in communities and environments. 

But before turning to resiliency, let me return to the role of grief work. For I am often wary of those leaping toward hope without having done the grief work. Or worse, as a way to by-pass the grief work. Such positive facing, ambitious undertakings seem often rooted in the same quality of redemptive drive that is characteristic of the acceleration and progress that got us into this mess in the first place. 

We grieve the loss of what we value. Where grieving ecological destruction is taboo is evidence of a lack of value placed upon the Earth and a lack of understanding or appreciation for our relational ties and dependency upon the Earth. “Ecological grief is likely to be more common among peoples that retain close living and working relationships to natural environments than those who do not.” (Cunsolo and Ellis, 2018) 

It is true, obviously, that no single person is responsible for global warming. However, as philosopher Timothy Morton speculates, we simultaneously have to hold a larger truth: as a species, we operate as a geological agent that did cause global warming and the sixth mass extinction underway of our planet. He coined the term hyperobject to describe things that are massively distributed in time and space, such as global warming. (2013, pp 1, 5) Likewise, post-colonial theorist and historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, 

“We are both part of the present of the human historical time as well as the present of some sort of a geological period that we are calling the Anthropocene. It's out of this sense of falling; being thrown into this doubleness that my first questions about climate change arose, as a humanist, as a human.” (2021)

Submission of a Body Into Earth, 2019

3 ft by 5.5 ft, Charcoal, graphite, black walnut ink, earth pigment and pastel on paper

I spend a great deal of time exploring my capacity to attune to both of these truths simultaneously; the latter one, in particular. I use art as a vehicle to speculate somatic attunement to non-human time and non-human entities. As in the works Tuning into Strata and Submission of a Body Into Earth, I use the body as a point of reference to speculate entanglement, collapsing the boundaries between “self” and “other”, “self” and “environment”, “self” and the “dead” or “unborn”. 

Global warming is a sobering encounter that illuminates a fate of interconnectivity. It becomes ever clearer to many that there is no way out and there is no “away”. Our trash and our exhaust come back to meet us by way of an elusive, looming recalibration that is seemingly indifferent to our fate. As it turns out, the Earth speaks. And [she] is communicating the necessity of replacing anthropocentric perspectives with multi-species, multi-level perspectives. 

I am ironically grateful for our troubling fate as a species, because it necessarily breaks a spell of ideological separation from the natural world. As the hypnosis of individualism dissipates it becomes evident that I do not exist as an independent agent. As a consequence of entanglement, I am responsible. By accepting responsibility for the actions of myself, my ancestors, and my culture, I am rooted in a web of actions and consequences that spans time and space. Therein, I am able to reclaim the wild-edges of my humanness. 

As demonstrated in my piece A Web of Intra-Actions, piecing together individual fragments to create a larger whole helps me realize the interconnectivity of a seemingly fragmented world. Recycling art objects is also a way of observing the constant state of change behind all beings, regardless of how fixed or permanent something might feel.

A Web of Intra-actions (Part 1), 2019

Approx. 10 ft. by 11 ft.

I find sanctuary and sanity in the aesthetics of darkness and limitation for their capacity to ground and stabilize being otherwise. Through painting and drawing I can process ideas about how to stay with the trouble; how to meet ends and let myself be re-arranged; how to appreciate the fertility of transformation; how to find sanctuary in limitation. Through art I can think through an acceptance of change and lean into death as a transformative act. Like composting, I can appreciate there is a cycle I am embedded in and my death does not just belong to me. 

I stay close to the trouble to sober my psyche and catalyze delusion into response-ability. By acknowledging and staying with what is not okay in the present, I believe we can compost our despair into sanity, purpose, compassion, and interconnectivity. This is where resilience comes in.

“Recognizing and reimagining our dominant signal is the beginning of change.”

-Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

Bibliography

Aloi, Giovanni. “Art after Nature #10.” Art After Nature, November 2021, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Course Lecture.

Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, and Nicholas de Pencier, Mercury Films, 2018.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History in a Planetary Age: Dipesh Chakrabarty in conversation with Homi K. Bhabha.” YouTube, uploaded by The University of Chicago, Jun 29, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmL0V6xBh6o

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Whose Anthropocene? A Response.” RCC Perspectives (Internet), no. 2, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, 2016, pp. 101–14.

Chapman, Anna, www.AnnaChapmanArt.com. Accessed December 2021.

Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Ellis, Neville R. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss.” Nature climate change 8.4 (2018): 275–281. Web.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780.

Inoue, C., Y. A. and Moreira, P., F. (2016) “Many worlds, many nature(s), one planet: Indigenous knowledge in the Anthropocene” in Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, pp.1-19

Jenkinson, Stephen. “Part 01 - Spirit Work, Conspiracies, Elderhood and Grief.” Orphan Wisdom interview with Kimberly Ann Johnson, September 2021, https://soundcloud.com/orphan-wisdom/2021-september-kimberly-ann-johnson-part-01-spirit-work-conspiracies-elderhood-and-grief.

Morton, Timothy. “What Is Dark Ecology?” Changing Weathers, 2016, http://www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology. Accessed 1 December 2021.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects : Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World . University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Composting Whiteness

Moving from INDIVIDUAL PURITY SALVATION 

toward NON-LINEAR ENTANGLED COLLECTIVE LIBERATION. 

THE SPIRIT PROJECT AT TASK

In this essay I make a case for, what I perceive to be, the Spirit Project at task for the Project of Whiteness today. I am using the word “project” twice here, but don’t get confused. When I talk about the “Project of Whiteness” I am referring to a constructed and maintained ideology that structurally, psychologically and institutionally pigeonholes power, land, and resource control to the white-body phenotype at the cost of equity, justice, and ecological equilibrium.(1) And when I talk about Spirit Project, I am referring to the necessary adaptations to inherited means of being in the world that a culture or a society must take up for psycho-social well-being. 

The way I see it, the spirit project of whiteness has been put off for many generations, all the while, the task at hand, building up in intensity. I see an orientation toward linear progress and an atrophied respect for death processes. 

In short, I believe the Spirit Project of the Project of Whiteness is to learn how to compost itself. I can’t help but take note of white culture’s fear of death. I say this because death is an important part of the compost cycle, and that might be where we’re getting stuck. How might appreciation of death as a transformative act bring us one step closer to solidarity and liberation?

Death is a natural part of the life cycle. Death is a release of old ways that don’t serve us anymore so we have room and energy to step into something new. It’s actually a quite fertile, generative place to be. I will use the framework of composting to articulate the life/death/life cycle I am getting at. 

In the first section of this essay I will run through a brief overview of the construction of whiteness for historical context and consider its insidious, pervasive means of operation and its orientation toward linear progress and individualism. Then I will walk through the motions of composting the trouble at hand by means of embodiment, release, and creation. I emphasize that a capacity to embody, to be with the trouble afoot is a necessary step to bring about the heat needed for re-arrangement. For stepping into something new. We must be in relationship with change in more present ways to provide the necessary foundation from which to build something new.

Click here to read the essay. This essay is speculative and I would love feedback!

OCTOBER 2021

SUSTAINABILITY AND THE ART STUDIO

Online Course for Artists and Art Educators

Sustain(ability) and the Art Studio is an online course that prepares artists and art educators to develop ways of thinking about sustainability in their artistic practice or teaching, and prepares them with essential tools for forming their own sustainable art studio and practices.

By the end of the course, students will have an understanding of various natural art processes (such as natural watercolors, inks and dyes, handmade paper or woodblock printmaking) and have a broad understanding of the possibilities that exist through the relationships and partnerships that can be developed within their communities.

This course is particularly designed and recommended for those interested in integrating sustainability in their teaching and/or artistic practice.

SIGN UP: https://www.sustainableartschool.org/online-course.html

Color Theory: Egg Tempera on Parchment

Making Egg Tempera

EGG TEMPERA

Egg tempera is non toxic because you are simply using egg yolk and water as a solvent. What can be toxic, however, is if you are using toxic pigments.

Egg tempera accessible, safe, and sustainable. It was prevalent in the medieval era and the early 15th century in Italy. Today, however, most artists don’t know much about it. This is partially because pure egg tempera paint can’ be commercially produced because it would putrefy if put a tube. With no market for the medium, the paint industry has no incentive to do research on egg tempera. (Egg Tempera Misconceptions, Koo Schadler).

So long as I’m doing a material test with egg-tempera on parchment, I though I might as well do a color theory exercise.

EGG YOLK MEDIUM

First I reached out to local grocery stores to see if I could acquire any recently expired eggs. I found that larger food chain grocery stores were strongly against the idea due to store policy of not giving away expired refrigerated items. Then I tried a small “mom and pop” grocery store and met a really kind woman who was happy to give me eggs and excited to hear about the project. Later I read, however that you want fresh eggs because you want the embryo of the egg to be strong enough that you can pinch it and drain the yolk out of the sack. You then discard the sack.

Its important to wear a mask when mixing pigments. Especially toxic pigments! Eye protection is also a good idea. You can find clear glasses for indoors.

MIXING PIGMENTS

Some pigments want to mix with water better than others, so mixing at the bottom of a cup is a great way to trap the pigment and the water into a tight space for integration. First I introduced the yellow, red, blue, violet, white, and charcoal pigments to a little water to create a paste. From these I mixed the various other colors on the outer edge of the color wheel (i.e yellow-orange, blue violet, etc). I stored all of these colors in recycled plastic containers from take out meals. “In egg tempera, the critical ratio is the amount of egg yolk to pigment. That ratio is, more or less, one part yolk to one part pigment, regardless of how much water has been added to either your medium or pigment paste.” (Koo Schadler)

COLOR THEORY

While visiting NYC this past week to drop off a painting, I met up with my old gilding mentor/boss of 5 years, Bill Gauthier (@gilding_nyc). He is a materials specialist and inspired me to return to “the fundamentals” to improve the integrity of my painting practice. Color theory was one of the things we discussed in depth (along with anatomy and life drawing). Bill stressed the importance of knowing color so well that you can, for instance, mix any color using only three basic colors to get there. “Basic” being ultramarine blue, cadmium red, yellow, magnesium violet, white, or black. He suggested that I re-create a full color wheel on using ONLY these colors.

Re-stretching Parchment

The hide I purchased from Pergamena was rolled up for storage. After having been rolled, the hide wants to keep this form. So, I needed to flatten the hide. To flatten the hide I soaked it in water for about 15-25 minutes. To my surprise, after just 5 minutes of soaking the hide became completely flexible, like a piece of fabric in the water. I then dried it off a bit with a towel and stretched pulled the edges taught to stretch it it onto a large piece of composite board using small nails. I had through at first to use a staple gun, but knowing that it will stabilize in this position as it dries, I thought it might be wise to prepare it for the next step I intend to do with some holes at outer tension points. After painting/gilding my plan it to hang it inside a wooden frame by threading some type of cordage through the hide holes from the nails to the wooden frame. Unfortunately I learned that it was not necessary to pull the hide so taught when it was wet. As it dried it tighened and tore through the skin, in some areas completely out of the skin so I thought to staple it (breaking the tension up into two points). This worked well but didn’t give me the holes I was looking for to thread cordage through for hanging later. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Sustainability & the Art Studio

I am currently participating in Ivan Asin’s 5 week class Sustainability and the Studio through the Center of Art Education and Sustainability (CAES, sustainableartschool.org). Ivan walked us through sustainability as a standalone concept (i.e. meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs). I appreciate the sentiment to think ahead, it reminds me of the Great Law of the Iroquois- to think seven generations ahead. This is not the culture I was born into, however. I am a European-American who grew up just outside of New York City in the suburbs of New Jersey surrounded by an industrial landscape. I learned to make art in classes with acrylic tempera paint in plastic cups using “disposable” brushes. All of this would get washed out in the sink (entering into the water system) or thrown out in the trash (heading straight to a landfill). This is still going on in most schools around the country (and I suspect in most first world nations). How did we become so disconnected from the materials we are using as artists and art educators? This seems to parallel a tech-influenced disconnection from each-other and sense of community, as well as a disconnection from sense of place and the non-human world.

I am fascinated by the different relationships to art materials throughout the renaissance, industrial and modern eras (and the psycho-social-spiritual shifts therein). In class we reviewed the historical background of the function of art and critiqued the emphasis on individualism in the modern era (see Suzi Gablik: the Reenchantment of Art).  As Ivan notes, artists produced their own materials until industrialization. In the 20th century art, nature, and science drifted apart. Now largely estranged from art making processes in the post-industrial world, some artists return to the work of earlier eras (such as the renaissance) wherein artists were making their own materials. A renowned reference for such processes can be found in Cennino Cennini’s book Il Libro Dell’Arte (written around the turn of the 15th century). There are many cultures all around the world, of course, who have long been and still do make art within their means; connective to the land and culture.

Class Project

Ivan has tasked us to take up a class project of our choosing over the next couple of weeks. He has generously supplied us with a plethora of resources on painting & inks, natural dyes, canvas & grounds, brushes, pencils & drawing, paper making, glues & adhesives, book arts, and ceramics. I have dabbled in making my own paints, inks, dyes, charcoal, glues, gessoes/canvases, and sketchbooks before. But I have not formally gathered my documentation and written about some of these experiments. This is one idea I have for my project. My ultimate ambition within and outside of my own art practice is to provide inspiration and support around sustainable approaches to artmaking. It would be a great exercise to demonstrate and share what I have learned. An alternative idea for my project for this class is more hands on: material testing with parchment (animal hide) for future formal artworks. I have never worked on parchment^1 before, so there is much to encounter. I would like to explore stretching/framing the parchment^2 and experimenting with egg tempera^3, oak gall ink^4, and/or a Cennini gesso recipe^5 for gilding. I am quite grateful to Ivan’s emphasis on building alliances and connections within your community to trade and acquire materials. This is exactly what can help shift me/us from an individual approach to art making toward a communal endeavor. I will be seeking connections from here-out.

1.     I have recently acquired a piece of parchment from Pergamena (pergamena.net) in upstate New York. As a meat eater, I am intentionally choosing to work on parchment (animal hide) as a means of reconnecting with ancient processes and the typically discarded parts of the animal whose life is taken for meat. I am dismayed that this hide is not from an animal I have been in relationship with, but rather has been collected by Pergamena from slaughter houses that distribute hides as a byproduct of the meat industry. In the future I would like to learn how to hunt and process the animal hide myself. But this is no small undertaking and I will need to find the right mentor who has a deeply respectful approach. I have many thoughts and feeling about how disconnected we are from our food sources but I will save those for another post at the time I more seriously approach parchment as a medium.

2.     To building a frame to stretch it for display I am going to reach out to a family friend who is a wood worker. I will have to do more research on the right string or clips to use.

3.     I am familiar with the process of egg-tempera (though it has been a while) which involves egg yolk and powdered pigment. I would like to reach out to local grocery stores to see if I can acquire recently expired eggs. I am quite grateful to Ivan’s emphasis on building alliances and connections within your community to trade and acquire materials. As for the pigment, I have a library of powdered pigments from Kremer pigments in NYC as well as many pigments that were passed down to me from a deceased family friend.

4.     The oak gall ink comes from a recipe I learned from the artist-educator Caroline Ross (@foundandground), which I have made before though it is starting to mold so I will have to look into why this is happening and whether I can still use this ink.

5.     As for the gilding, I will need to create an old gesso recipe from Cennini which involves plaster of Paris (gypsum? I can either get this at blick or try to use some chalk from Bologna that I have), white lead (though I may be able to get away with marble dust that I have) sugar (or honey), and egg white glair. Red clay or pigment is often added though not necessary. Gold is then applied to this gesso on the parchment. I spent 4-5 years working with a gilder, Bill Gauthier in New York city and whenever we did large jobs I would save the scraps of gold and collect them. Bill saved most of his extra metal leaf from projects and gifted me several books upon my departure from NYC. While he was an incredible mentor who was devout to his craft, I ultimately left this industry because the extraction and distribution of gold is a dark story. I am subsequently fascinated with our symbolic and material relationship to gold and would like to learn more about its extraction and distribution.

Heres a pic I took at Pergamena when I was in upstate New York last month. There are stretched hides in the parchment workshop area. (Pergamena.net)

ECO-ART-EDU

ECO-ART-EDU

Welcome!

I am starting a blog to document my adventures in wild-crafting art materials. I have been painting for nearly 15 years and have undergone formal and informal training in the arts. After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and working for various artists and artisans in New York City, I came to understand how unsustainable common approaches to art making in America are. Simultaneously, I began to practice medicinal herbalism and encounter a variety of artists taking up wild-crafting (such as Nick Neddo and Caroline Ross). I became fascinated with our relationship to materials.

I am writing to you from North America (turtle island). It is my observation that prior generations fixated on growth and accumulation, yet today many youth (i.e Greta Thunberg) are fixated on sustainability and responsibility as we contend with the impacts of the Great Acceleration amidst a destabilizing socio-ecological context. Nearly every field of research and practice is beginning to critically evaluate the consequences of our actions and look for sustainable and just approaches to their practice. The field of art and art education is no different. I have come across many poignant theorists and practitioners campaigning for the necessity of socio-ecological approaches to the arts and art education in this perplexing time. 

My passion as an artist-educator lies in the intersection of fine-arts, the healing arts, and ecology. After years of apprenticeship, practice, and reflection within these contexts, I am enthusiastically honing in on the emerging field of Eco-Art-Edu.  While I am still feeling for the potentials there-in, critically evaluating our relationship to materials as artists and educators is a great place to start. What does it suggest to a child that we are encouraging them to express themselves using plastic, non-recyclable materials that are often meant to be used once and thrown away? Many art teachers I have spoken with feel disempowered because they do not have the financial and bureaucratic support to imagine or pursue another route. I have witnessed through my personal practice as an artist and educator as well as through the observation of others that the endeavor of making art materials has the capacity to empower us, ground us, orient us, and widen our anthropocentric perspective. It also increases accessibility in contexts where budget for art materials restricts programming. 

I am led to believe that this is a relevant and significant topic to a wide range of art practitioners (from artists to educators) and has the potential to be woven together with science, ecology, and social science curriculums. My goal for this blog is to document my materials research and brainstorm adaptable curriculum for artists and educators.

Cheers!

Anna