Growing Toward Light
Date
2023-06-30
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Abstract
In my work, I explore the experience of making art as a tool to move away from despair and towards hope for the environment. As an environmentalist and artist, my process-based art is a counteraction to paralyzing feelings of fear and helplessness that arise through living with and studying climate change. Care and regeneration are both the means and the goal; I exercise care for my immediate surroundings in order to receive care from them. In this work, I develop my personal relationship with Mount Holyoke campus, and one small room within it, as a model for caring and mutually supportive relationships between larger communities and ecosystems. I immerse myself deeply in time spent making and observing, and relinquish control of the visual forms of my work in favor of working in generative partnership with the light, water, spaces, and living things which construct and inhabit my ecosystem. I focus on the cyclicality and foundationally nourishing nature of sunlight as a metaphor for the promise of ecological renewal. In my writing and making, I am inspired and informed by James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Manifesto!, Glenn Albrecht’s Earth Emotions, and Andreas Weber’s Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene. These artists and writers reflect the relationships between individuals, spaces, and living ecosystems that I engage with in Growing Toward Light. This work is the manifestation of my effort to redefine my relationship with my environment through a collection of meditative and ritual art practices focusing on renewal, care, and complex ecological interrelations.
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Art, Environmentalism