MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 29, 2022

This week we recognize  Fredericka Foster and her contemplative and dedicated work focused on water.

"Our bodies are mostly water, and we are an intimate part of the hydrological cycle. Think about this when you first awaken – we are all water filters. We intrinsically know this, and that all life depends on water. Looking at water, or a painting of water, resonates emotionally in our bodies and minds."

Foster, a painter and photographer, works primarily with the theme of water to raise awareness and examine its centrality to life; how its movement shapes the world socioeconomically, environmentally and subconsciously. An accomplished colorist using a limited palette and many layers of paint, she works "in the romantic landscape tradition of Dove, Hartley, Burchfield and O'Keeffe." She has shown her work since the late 1970s, though the AIDS epidemic, healing and dying has inspired her paintings and installations since the 1990s. Buddhist practice influences her art and she has engaged in public talks on this topic with composer Philip Glass.

"Each water painting begins with a photograph. I travel to bodies of water ranging from the deep fjords of Norway to the industrialized Hudson River, choosing images that stimulate my imagination and that showcase the complexity of water as it plays with light, wind, and the earth beneath it. These photos are models for, but not dictators of, the painting process. My vision changes even as I seek to get the image down, and I experiment with ways to mix and layer pigments in order to trap the evanescent nature of the experience." 

Foster often collaborates with artists, scientists and non-profit organizations on water in relation to the environment, pollution and climate change. To teach about the water crisis, she has presented her work to hundreds of scientists, including a performance titled   Exploring a Catastrophe to Water Through Science and Artat the Sage Assembly 2017, based on a sewage spill into Puget Sound that same year; and an exhibition and talk at the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries. Her video series, Like a Circle in Water, was part of the Elements video series commissioned by the Tricycle Foundation in 2014, an official selection of the Awareness Festival and Blue Ocean Film Festival.

Fredericka Foster    grew up surrounded by water, and with a Sami great grandmother who nutured a mythical reverence for water and water culture for the artist. As a cultural activist, through her painting and exhibition curating, Foster raises and sustains dialogue, transforming our understanding and misperceptions in relation to the environment. She is known for guest curating and participating in The Value of Water at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City (2011-2012), which was the largest exhibition to ever appear at the Cathedral. The show anchored a year long initiative by the Cathedral on our dependence upon water, and featured over 200 artworks by forty artists, including Jenny Holzer, Robert Longo, Mark Rothko, William Kentridge, April Gornik, Kara Walker, Kiki Smith, Pat Steir, Edwina Sandys, Alice Dalton Brown, Teresita Fernandez, Eiko Otake, and Bill Viola. Foster is the founder of Think About Water, a water advocacy website that gathers cultural activists and their work together in order to strengthen their cause. Foster’s notable one-person shows include Water Way, Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries at Clarkson University, Beacon, NY; five solo exhibitions titled Water Way at the Fischbach Gallery, NYC (2013, 2009, 2006, 2004, 2002); Deus/Virus: Transforming the Protease, Riverrun Gallery, Lambertville, NJ; and Transforming the HIV Protease, The Norbert Considine Gallery at Stuart Country Day School, Princeton, NJ. frederickafoster.com

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Fredericka Foster, Arctic Diptych Midnight Sun, 2017, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches; Covid 19 Drowning, 2021, oil on linen, 20 × 34 inches; Tree and Water, 2017, oil on canvas, 18 × 24 inches; Hudson River IX, 2007, oil on canvas, 42 x 64 inches; Himalayas Carved by Water, 2013, oil on canvas, 42 x 64 inches; below is portrait of the artist by Andrew Gladstone.

artnet Art World

paris cyan cian in collaboration with theShoreCo.'s Cameron Mitchell Ware (creative producer) and jeremy de'jon (AWAW EAG), theShore:in/SIGHT (2021), film. Photo Credit: Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee

Here Are the 14 Gripping, Change-Making Projects That Won Anonymous Was A Woman’s First Ever $250,000 Environmental Art Grants

The grant is designed to address the lack of existing support for environmental art.

Vittoria Benzine, August 24, 2022

A community project focused on soil health, an installation that brings queer artists to the streets of New Orleans, and an exhibition that interrogates Brownsville, Texas’s rebranding as a SpaceX “space city” are among the projects awarded funding as part of the first ever Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants.

The program—an offshoot of the long-running Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant initiative—is a partnership with New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and offers a onetime grant of up to $20,000 to 14 female-led, impact-driven environmental art projects in the U.S. Awardees hail from locations ranging from Puerto Rico to the Pacific Northwest and explore climate change through performance, magic, mycology, fashion design, and more.

Read full article on Artnet here

Image Detail: "WE ARE HERE/ESTAMOS AQUI" (Michelle Glass) featuring Epifania Salazar, Francisca Rangel, Juanita Garza, Monse Rodriquez, Luz Maria Sosa, Photo Credit: Natalie Zajac

$250,000 Awarded to 14 Projects Led by Women-Identifying Artists in the United States and U.S. Territories.

Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) have announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG) program, which provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists nationwide. The program awarded a total of $250,000 in funding to artists from states and territories including California, Kansas, Louisiana, New York, Puerto Rico (Borikén), and Texas. Selected projects use a range of media to address soil, air, and water pollution; colonialism and its environmental and human impact; and climate change issues including coastal erosion—many which directly involve and engage affected communities.

Image Detail: digital artwork by Autumn Leiker

The AWAW EAG program supports environmental art projects that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. The intended impact of the project was an important factor in the selection process. The applications were reviewed by an esteemed panel comprising Patricia Watts, founder/curator of ecoartspace; Angie Tillges, Great River Passage Fellow, City of Saint Paul, MN; and Alicia Grullón, conceptual multimedia artist, educator, and organizer. Each of the selected projects will have a public engagement component which will be completed by June 2023. See below for more on each of the selected projects:

Continue reading on the NYFA website/blog, here

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 22, 2022

This week we recognize Hugh Pocock   Hugh Pocockand his thirty year career engaging with the dynamics of natural and cultural phenomena.

Pocock seeks to integrate the intersections of labor, industry and organic materials, such as water, air, salt, wood and earth. He is interested in the history and metaphor of the human relationship to natural resources, space, time, consumerism, art, energy and language, which he investigates through his sculptures, installations, performances and videos.

Living With A Log (above) was created in 1998, in Ashland, Oregon, and consisted of a 2.5 ton, 42 foot log that was placed inside of a residential home. Daily activities of cooking, eating, sleeping, working and socializing were conducted alongside of the Log.

Pocock's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including Portikus Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, the Wexner Museum, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. He has also built “non-art sites” for private homes, movie theatres and farms.

Drilling A Well For Water (above) was drilled in the Levi Sculpture Garden of the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2003. This activity was performed live during museum hours. The well reached the water table at 40 feet and a hand pump was installed. The 350 gallons of water from the well was added to the museum's heating and cooling system where it is permanently recycled to create both hot and cold air. This process produced the object Volume which is the volumetric space of the entire museum building.

This Garden, making salt and evaporation drawings (below) was performed at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2004. Seawater was collected and evaporated to produce salt in the Project Room. The salt was dried, bottled and given away to museum visitors. An Evaporation Drawing was made to mark the time and atmospheric conditions unique to the site for the duration of the exhibition.

No Man’s Land (below) is a proposal for a permanent park for the Non-Humans that Pocock conceived in 2018. The project is ongoing.

"No Man’s Land will be an area of land where humans are prohibited from entering. It is a space where the plants, animals, insects and fungi will have full and sole autonomy. Where they are free from the presence of human beings. The park will not be used for research or organized observation. It is not a place for humans to study or 'enjoy' nature. No tagging, recording, research or human technology of any kind is permitted in No Man’s Land. While it is recognized that Humans are a part of the earth’s ecology, NML is proposed to be a legally protected place where the Non-Humans are guaranteed to be free of the presence of Humans and their actions.

Legal Goals: No Man’s Land is both a physical and a legal space. The legal goal of the project is to establish the living ecology that is within NML as a recognized Legal Entity. Identifying it as a place that can never be interfered with by human acts of possession. This will be done through Trusts, Deeds, local ordinance or another legal device that is to be determined."

Hugh Pocock      was born in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and raised in the United States, England and Aotearoa. Time, energy, climate change, social connectivity and the Rights of Nature are among the issues he has investigated and continues to explore. Over the past three decades, he has shown his work in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Santa Fe and Baltimore as well as internationally in the former Soviet Union, Germany and China. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and then completed his MFA at UCLA in New Genres. Pocock is a faculty member at  Maryland Institute College of Art where he is the founding Coordinator of the Minor in Sustainability and Social Practice and the Studio Major titled "Ecosystems, Sustainability and Justice." He teaches Sculpture, Video and Social Practice courses that focus on the impact of Climate Change and issues of Sustainability. He is also Co-Facilitator of the Global Ecologies Studio taught annually at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland.  Pocock lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. hughpocock.com  IG@hughpocockstudio 

Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Hugh Pocock, Untitled, 1995, Warner Studios, Los Angeles, glass, soil, Caucasian flesh toned paint; Living With A Log, 1998, Ashland, Oregon; Drilling A Well For Water, 2003, Levi Sculpture Garden, Baltimore Museum of Art; This Garden, making salt and evaporation drawings, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art, California; No Man’s Land, 2018- present, proposal for a permanent park for the Non-Humans; photograph of the artist, links to a recent symposium presentation on No Man's Land during the artists' solo exhibition at Burren College of Art, Ireland, June 20 - July 22, 2022.

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 15, 2022

This week we recognize Catherine Chalmers and her twenty plus year career collaborating with nature.

"I refer to myself as an artist. But, perhaps it’s more accurate to say I’m part of an art collective. I never work alone. My colleagues just don’t happen to be human. Early on I raised my collaborators in the studio, fed them, housed them. The dialogue was between me and the cockroach, me and the praying mantis. But, with the Leafcutters project, the exchange is between me and millions of wild ants."

"My work is at the intersection of art, science and nature.  I do extensive research for each of my long-term, multimedia projects and a direct engagement with the natural world is central to my what I do. My work aims to give form to the richness, as well as the brutality and indifference that often characterize our relationship with animals."

"I use the narrative possibilities of the visual arts to bridge the increasing rift between humanity and the ecosystem and to creatively engage with the systems that support life on earth.  Our culture is far richer with the inclusion of other life forms."

"I’ve worked with a variety of media, from engineering to painting, photography, video, sculpture and drawing, yet my artistic career has been focused on one central issue, how to confront and challenge our anthropocentric point of view.  Humanity has been drawing lines in the sand forever, defining what is in and what is out, maybe now, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, is a good time to reconsider those lines and what lives on the other side."

For her upcoming exhibition We Rule (below), opening at the Drawing Center in New York, October 2022, Chalmers will create a site-specific drawing installation in the lower-level gallery and corridor that depicts the underground labyrinth of an ant colony. The installation is inspired by the artist's observation of, and engagement with more than one dozen colonies of Leafcutter Ants on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. Over a ten-year period, Chalmers returned annually to the same spot, filming, photographing, and tracking the fate of these colonies. Leafcutter Ants are a metaphor for humanity’s life on earth: they farm, communicate, and collaborate; they also colonize, battle, and destroy.

Catherine Chalmers   holds a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London. She has exhibited her artwork around the world, including MoMA P.S.1; MASSMoCA; Kunsthalle Vienna; Today Art Museum, Beijing; among others. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, ArtNews and Artforum. Chalmers has been featured on PBS, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. Two books have been published on her work: FOOD CHAIN (Aperture 2000) and AMERICAN COCKROACH (Aperture 2004). Her video “Safari” received a Jury Award (Best Experimental Short) at SXSW Film Festival in 2008. In 2010 Chalmers received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2015 she was awarded a Rauschenberg Residency. In 2018, she created a course called Art & Environmental Engagement, which she taught that spring quarter at Stanford University. Her video “Leafcutters” won Best Environmental Short at the 2018 Natourale Film Festival in Wiesbaden, Germany and in 2019, won the Gil Omenn Art & Science Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. She lives in New York City. catherinechalmers.com

Featured Images: ©Catherine Chalmers, TREE, Northeastern Cherry, 2008, 11 feet tall, Boise Art Museum; Food Chain Series (praying mantis); Food Chain, 2000, installation at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Idols and Offerings Series: PORTRAIT, pigment print, 30 x 45 inches; Leaf Cutter Ant drawings, 2022, pen and ink on paper; the artist with E.O. Wilson, 2012 (below).

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 8, 2022

This week we recognize Blue McRight and  Blue McRighher dedication to the elimination of plastic pollution and the protection of our oceans.

"My world of artmaking is deeply immersive. I cross the wires of intention and chance to see what will happen, and the resulting shock rings me like a bell. I am struck, hollowed out, reverberating, transfixed until interrupted by dinner or some other distraction, whereupon my reaction is and always will be “five more minutes.” I am dedicated to creating a visual, metaphoric language about water and the ocean, synthesizing years of witnessing the undersea wilderness as a scuba diver. In ways that are provocative, but more poetic than didactic, my work engages with major environmental issues including drought, sea level rise and ocean plastic pollution."

"The organic processes of life behaviors, gender fluidity, reproduction, and death in marine creatures and their environments inspire me. These processes are timeless, unsentimental; outside of humans’ shifting cultural and political values. They continue with or without us. I trust their beauty, their indifference, their violence and integrity."

"Like an octopus, each of my arms has its own brain. The thoughts in my hands guide me: knotting and tying, cutting, sewing, and binding, I make each sculpture in cycles of repetition and improvisation. I utilize fishing nets, fish and crab traps, and bait baskets; though porous, they carry the weight of phantoms. They speak to life, death, struggle, capture, escape, despair, longing, and elation. They enable my formal and narrative exploration of transparency, weight and weightlessness, color, texture, and volume."

"My mind is in the gutter; constantly looking for plastic straws and lids in the street and on the beach. Along highways and at gas stations, I gather fallen urban fruit from the filthy orchard of our consumer culture. I insist that plastic trash such as salvaged nets, rope, straws, lids and other objects can be beautiful as material for artwork, forcing us to confront the possibilities of what we thoughtlessly discard, giving agency to the rejected as it assumes space in the realm of cultural dialogue, alluding to what is overlooked and wasted."

"The ultimate meaning of my work resides in engaging viewers while remaining elusive, in making personal and poetic connections to the conflict between nature and a culture of consumption. It speaks to our present era of the Anthropocene. It makes no predictions as to its outcome." Click image above for video interview

Blue McRight's      work explores the psychological and cultural terrain between nature, personal experience, and politics. She creates works that include found objects such as vintage nozzles and sprinklers, rubber hoses, faucets, and used books as well as natural ephemera such as trees and tree branches. The objects undergo transformative operations that abstract them while enhancing their realist core. McRight studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1974 to 1975 and the Evergreen State College from 1977 to 1979. She began exhibiting in the early 1980s and has been included in numerous group shows including at the Delaware Art Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The artist has received public sculpture commissions from the City of Ventura, Culver City, Los Angeles, San Buenaventura and San Diego, all in the state of California.  McRight has received grants from the Santa Fe Arts Council, and her work is included in the public collections of Sun America in New York, the Port of Portland in Oregon, Chemical Bank in New York, the Delaware Art Museum, Mountain Bell in Colorado, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Palm Springs Arts Museum. She lives and works in Venice, California.  bluemcright.com

Featured Images: ©Blue McRight, The Invisible Obvious, 2021, studio installation, mixed media, dimensions variable; Antigone/Drink Me: Siren, 2014, mixed media, 60 x 111 inches; Quench: Well Wisher, 2012, mixed media, 50 x 43 x 29 inches; Fathom, 2020, installation including salvaged ocean plastics, lids, nets, rope and objects, dimensions variable; Font, 2016, used books, rubber hoses, vintage brass faucets and sprinklers, wood and metal, installation for COLA Individual Artist Fellowship exhibition, 9 x 12 x 15 feet; Still image of artist taken from COLA video interview 2016 (below). 

E

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (July 23, 1973), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles

 

The Earthkeepers Handbook: recipes and remedies for healing the land and ourselves

Taking cues from the 1976 homestead handbook by Kim Abeles titled Crafts, Cookery and Country Living (background image), this fall 2022 we will assemble an ecoartspace "Members Handbook" for healing ourselves and the land.

Get your favorite recipes ready for making art materials, concoctions, spells, foods, and remedies. You can even submit a manifesto à la Mierle Ukeles (above), or directions on how to develop special skills. The objective is to share your knowledge and help make the world a better place. 

NOTE: Hand drawn images and text are encouraged (à la Abeles), although typed text and photographs are accepted.

The Plan: Our goal with this book is to include as many members as possible, at least 200-300. The fee for submitting recipes/remedies is to cover the cost of designing and editing the book, and reviewers fees.

The reviewers are not looking to eliminate recipes, and will only be making sure that there's not too much repetition. Though they may ask for revisions if needed. They will also be organizing the book layout/design by themes and will write introductory essays.

The book will initially be available online, launching this fall, and a limited edition printed book will be ready at the start of 2023.

We are encouraging an ethos that challenges systemic racism and colonial extraction, which are at the core of ecocide. And, we will place importance on the inclusion of indigenous and LGTBQ voices. This book will represent the mission of ecoartspace which encourages a non-hierarchical, open-source dissemination of creative and ecofeminist wisdom; exactly what's lacking today in addressing human actions and interventions in the land that are causing the climate to change so quickly.

Other sources to consider regarding developing replicable social practice projects, see HighWaterLine Guide and SOS Action Guides (Watts, 2013-2014).

Note: The title Earthkeepers was inspired by the Heresies Magazine issue #13: Earthkeeping / Earthshaking: Feminism & Ecology (Volume 4, Number 1), 1981.

MEMBERS ONLY, NOT A MEMBER? PLEASE JOIN US

 

Timeline:

Deadline for submissions is September 15, 2022

Review submissions September and contact artists if needed for revisions

Book will be designed in October

The online book will launch by November 2022

Our goal is to go to print in December/January 2022

The printed book will launch by February 2023

 

 

REVIEWERS

  Photo: Ken Marchionno

Kim Abeles explores society, science literacy, feminism, and the environment, creating projects with science and natural history museums, health departments, air pollution control agencies, and National Park Service. NEA-funded projects involved a residency at the Institute of Forest Genetics; and Valises for Camp Ground in collaboration with Camp 13, a group of female prison inmates who fight wildfires. Permanent outdoor works include sculptural Citizen Seeds along the Park to Playa Trail in Los Angeles, and Walk a Mile in My Shoes, based on the shoes of the Civil Rights marchers and local activists. Abeles has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund, and her process documents are archived at the Center for Art + Environment. Her work is in public collections including MOCA, LACMA, CAAM, Berkeley Art Museum, and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. “Kim Abeles: Smog Collectors, 1987-2020” is a survey exhibition of the environmental series, presented at CSU Fullerton (2022) and CSU Sacramento (2023). Recent publications about her projects include New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the book, Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Routledge Press (2022). https://kimabeles.com

 

WhiteFeather Hunter is a multiple award-winning Canadian artist and scholar, holding an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, Australian Government International Scholarship and University of Western Australia International Postgraduate Scholarship. Before commencing her PhD, WhiteFeather was founding member and Principal Investigator of the Speculative Life BioLab at the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology at Concordia University (Montreal) from 2016-2019. Her biotechnological art practice intersects technofeminism, witchcraft, micro and cellular biology with performance, new media and craft. Recent presentations include at Ars Electronica, Art Laboratory Berlin, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Royal College of Art London, Innovation Centre Iceland, and numerous North American institutions. WhiteFeather’s recent doctoral research into developing a novel menstrual serum for tissue engineering experiments was spotlighted by Merck/ Sigma-Aldrich for International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2021 as part of their #nextgreatimpossible campaign.www.whitefeatherhunter.ca

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MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

August 1, 2022

This week we recognize Marietta Patricia Leis in Santa Fe, New Mexico and her series from 2019 titled       ENGRAINED: Ode to Trees.

"We’ve always known trees—they grow along with us marking our lives. Perhaps there has been a favorite tree in your life—one that you climbed, picked fruit from or one that defined your property from another or you contemplated outside your classroom window. Trees are special friends because they provide us with so much—shelter, shade, nourishment, beauty, protection, refuge, regeneration and a purifier of our air. The Japanese have an activity they call “bathing in the woods,” walking among trees to dispel the stress of life and maintain mental health. It is no wonder then that we grieve when a tree(s) goes missing."

"I am an outed tree-hugger. I have said hello and good-bye and goodnight to trees. I have thanked them and loved them and I have mourned their loss. In fact it was the loss of my 30-foot high spruce tree, the one that lured me to the property where I lived and worked, which died shortly after I moved in, that provided the first physical materials and impetus. Maybe its job was over when it found me but my job had just begun."

"Even as I mourned the loss of the spruce I saved slices of the Spruce’s trunk that eventually transformed into some of the art forms in this homage to forests, tree canopies, felled trees, reforested trees, the mighty great grandfather trees and the baby sprout. As a multimedia artist I was inspired to use my entire tool chest of videos, sculpture, paintings and prints to tell the story of trees and appeal to as many of the viewer’s senses as possible. My reductive art is intended to reach beyond our familiar intellectual understanding to a place where instinct and feelings lie."

"There is no ugly tree but there are people that commit ugly acts against trees by not caring for them—starving them—or killing them often with a sad price to pay. E.G; Iceland has a dramatic barren landscape without trees because the early settlers used them for housing and fires. Now the planting of new trees in their volcanic landscape has proven almost impossible. Icelandic people I have spoken with had never grown up with trees but longed for them the way an orphan longs for parents. And, then there is the cutting of forests where greed can overcome our need for preservation."

"My hope is that my art will attract the viewer with beauty and invigorate our love and need for trees and propel us to save them for our planet’s health, grace and survival for future generations!"

Tree

Oh majestic tree
how safe I feel
hugging your stable trunk
Although you tower over me
you protect my soul
from unbelieving

Leis's most recent book of poetry titled Engrained is available for purchase in the ecoartspace store (click image below).

Marietta Patricia Leis    considers herself a lifetime artist. The arts have been her primary focus since she was a child growing up in New Jersey. She studied and performed as a dancer at 14 and then moved to New York City when she was 17 where she studied the Stanislavski Method of acting with Lee Strasberg. Between classes and gigs as a dancer, actor and model, she was making paintings and began to show her work in the East Village. In 1962, she moved to Los Angeles for her acting career and played minor roles in film as she continued to paint. Visual art eventually became her primary form of creative expression, which led her to New Mexico and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. A longtime fan of minimalism, one of Leis’ major goals has been to evoke emotion from simplistic elements. Extensive travels have influenced her concerns for the planet, its sustainability and the inter-connectivity of everything in it. The ENGRAINED Series was exhibited at the New Mexico Museum of Art in 2020, and most recently included in a large solo exhibition titled Sense Memories at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, 2020-2021. www.mariettaleis.com

Featured Images: ©Marietta Patricia Leis, Seed 27, 2018, oil on panel, 59 x 49.75 inches, Traces 4, 2018, oil on Spruce wood, 17 x 14 x 16 inches;  Remembrances 2, 2018, burnt Spruce wood, lacquer, steel, 23 x 22.4 x 3 inches; Tree, 2018, mixed media installation, 9 x 9 feet; Sense Memories installation shot at CAA, Santa Fe, 2021: Engrained: Reflections on Trees in Poetry, book published 2021; Artist portrait in front of Silent Road, 2019, tyvek, mixed media (below).

 The ecoartspace August 2022 e-Newsletter for non-members is here

Eternal Forest

Editorial for The Empty Square (written January 2022)

“Learning to live like a forest, to operate like a forest, running on reciprocity, on mutuality, could perhaps be a proposition for a healthier society, one that considers the well-being of other species well as important as its own. I am asking myself can we really learn this? Forest is telling me that she can teach us: she is a great book we can read if we can connect the patterns in our minds.” Evgenia Emets.

By Evgenia Emets, artist and founder of Eternal Forest

What if we lived in Forest Time?

What if our society was organised like a forest?

What if our relationship with forests was based on reciprocity, respect and long-term vision?

What if forests became sacred places for us, once again?

 

These are the questions I have been asking myself since I was called to manifest the project I call ‘Eternal Forest’.

In 2018,  when I moved from London to Portugal, I became interested in the relationship humans have with forests and started to explore it through art, poetry and film. Now, after four years of learning and listening deeply to forests and people, I am convinced that the forest is calling us to review our relationship. We need to revise our values, rethink our priorities, revitalise our creativity, intuition and spirit. We need to reconnect to the sacred cycles of nature, build a relationship with nature as equals.

Today, as I tune into deep interconnectedness, I see the hope of a society operating like a forest: together, in a mutually beneficial and collaborative way. The transition to such a society requires a shift on personal, community and societal levels. What is needed is not only a rethinking of our modes of seeing and our behaviours but also a re-imagining of the actual core of our being in relation to the whole ecosystem, the other-than-human. This also demands a shift in our understanding of time, our highly controlled, linear, short-term vision of time, towards an expanded perspective, one that embraces a non-linear, multiplicity-of-cycles, long-term view of a more natural time, Forest Time.

There is not a single day that passes without news of the destruction of another bit of old-growth forest. For paper, for wood, for soya and corn production, for mining, for real-estate development - the list of reasons for this erasure is never-ending. To me, it is like destroying an incredibly intricate complex masterpiece, an artwork of Time. Rivers are disappearing, soils are being washed away by torrential rains and are being dispersed by the ever-increasing violence of winds. The forest can be restored, but an old-growth forest is an artwork that needs its artist - The Long Time - in order for it to re-emerge.

Everything is interconnected; we just need to tune our senses to see that. Forests are us. We are forests. Everything in our culture is because of the forest, every object, every piece of clothing, every vehicle, every building is somehow indebted  to the forest. Denying or ignoring this reflects our disconnection, ignorance, numbness and loss of gratitude. 

 

What are we missing?

When I moved to Portugal, I experienced the most shocking environmental disaster I have witnessed in my life - the aftermath of the devastating forest fires of 2017, with kilometre after kilometre of charred remains of trees marking the ravages endured by the earth. An otherworldly landscape of devastation created by fires sweeping through the endless eucalyptus plantations that have taken over the Portuguese countryside. Burned forests, farms, gardens and villages. Human, plant and animal lives lost. Seeing this devastation pushed me to connect with communities able to share their feelings and observations of the forest. I was hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the situation and uncover the root of the crisis. But I also desperately wanted to hear that people still remembered and loved their forests, despite the wide-scale replacement of natural forests with monoculture tree factories.

After making my first art-film Eternal Forest (2018), composed of interviews with people from the communities in the area of Góis, Coimbra, an area greatly affected by those tragic fires, I organised film screenings and discussions all around Portugal. While meeting people, I kept hearing similar questions and observations. Everywhere the conversations focused on the economic benefits of a profit-driven, extractive relationship with nature, and concerns, framed by a scarcity mindset, about the viability of living with naturally biodiverse forests.

Forest is a place where we plant and harvest - forest gradually becomes a farm. If a certain element of the ecosystem has no commercial value, we simply take it out of the equation. The end result is monoculture - endless rows of eucalyptus, cork oaks, olive, almond and pine trees, with little in-between. This inevitably leads to a loss of health and vitality of the ecosystem, a loss of biodiversity and water, and the degradation of the soil. The land stops giving.

I want to contemplate a thought for a moment. Scarcity does not exist in a healthy, biodiverse, fully functional ecosystem. Scarcity has been instilled into us based on a story of losing our place in the garden of Eden. Working hard, extracting what we can, and when we cannot take more, moving on - this has been our path. Today there are simply no places left without the scars of industrial-scale extraction, and all too often the idea of an abundant garden seems unbelievable when we hold in our hands the soil that has no life and is just dust.

What if we gave space and time?

I sensed there was something fundamental missing from the conversations I was having. It felt like trying to listen to the faint pulse of someone who had lost consciousness, to see if they were coming back. That piece of the puzzle came to me as a counterpoint to the mainstream economic narrative of always needing to profit from the forest.

After many remarkable encounters with the public, climate change specialists, soil and forest scientists, ecologists, permaculturists, philosophers and anthropologists, I kept questioning the idea that we can only ‘afford’ forests when they are economically viable. Once I formulated the new thought, it was clear that it was fresh but not new - it was an old message from the forest that has been dreaming for a long time (not so long, though, in Forest Time) and returned  because we need it now so badly and are ready to hear it.

This is when the vision of an Eternal Forest as a sanctuary came to me. It was to be a protected forest space, created through art, with a focus on biodiversity and supported by a local community for 1,000 years. I could finally verbalise it, describe it and even design it. During an art residency in 2019 I proposed to establish with a community an Eternal Forest Sanctuary, as a place, process and practice, whereby the community became the long-term guardian of the forest sanctuary, created a cycle of events and experiences, and welcomed artists interested in co-creating with the evolving forest ecosystem.

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