Attending to Muse & Nature in Lockdown

Artist Hanien Conradie shares the impulse and process behind a Covid19-lockdown collaboration that brings together image and text; and how, in a period of human silence, her muse and the natural world seemed to work in similar ways.


2,170 words: estimated reading time = 8.5 minutes + gallery


What does it take for distracted creatives to surrender to the cries of their muse’s desires? For some it is simple, they hear, they listen and they translate through making. But some of us academically trained artists scold the muse for her infantile ideas, her need to play and her seemingly inconsistent barrage of desires. And then there are some of us who ignore her voice year after year…

In my practice I work in locally found natural pigments and burnt plant material as part of an expression of climate change and my concern with loss as we head toward a Sixth Mass Extinction. The global ecological anguish and my personal heartache inform the colour palette of my work: earthy ochres and monochromatic black paintings. Black, as a colour of grieving in the West, is also a colour that represents infinite creative potential and has become more and more prominent in my films, my ritual work and my paintings.

Human silence & other voices

As the severe restrictions of the Covid19 lockdown isolated South Africans in their homes, I considered what artworks I could make from a small desk in my bedroom. For quite a few years I have been an active environmental voice, calling for a change in the way we relate to the natural world. Suddenly, because of the virus, the Earth gained respite from our feverish pursuit of money; our disregard for the effect we have on the rest of the natural world. At the same time, everyone became quiet and introspective and the sounds of the natural world became more apparent than before; and people noticed. It seemed to me that the Covid19 lockdown provided the perfect opportunity for humanity to reconsider the way we live. For the moment it felt like my quest for change was interceded by an outer manifestation that was so severe that it forced us to adjust our habits naturally.

Seeking the muse: Showing image 25 from Hanien Conradie's 40 DAYS series
40 DAYS – image 15
Artist: Hanien Conradie © 2020

Within the human silence of the lockdown, the voice of my muse became more insistent than before. I realized that the workings of my muse and the natural world were similar somehow and that less noise and distraction increased the intensity of my creative compulsions. The very uncertain and unprecedented circumstances swept away my normal, considered academic approach to my practice. I felt like breaking free from all my self-imposed limitations, obligations and preconceptions about what my art should be. I imagined that this is how artists might feel during times of war: the focus shifts from making work for others to making work because this is what I do to keep myself sane. I thus found myself surrendering to whatever my muse wanted to make.

I had recently been gifted a set of Winsor & Newton Artists’ Watercolours with 24 colours in a beautiful transportable black box. The new paint had my muse salivating and my hunger to make small brightly coloured paintings seemed vast and insatiable. Before the lockdown, I had planned to make on-site landscape portraits with them. This idea was in keeping with my practice of visiting and relating to living natural landscapes, but traveling outside of my home was prohibited during lockdown.

In addition to the delicious paints, my partner inherited an equally delectable collection of National Geographic magazines from his father. Whenever I saw their bright yellow spines I remembered the remarkable pictures hidden inside and my childlike delight as I pored over the magnificent mysteries of our existence through their pages. Since my muse was completely uninterested in working with the only ‘living’ places I had access to — the interior of my home or my small garden — I decided to page through the magazines. I started to mark any images that thrilled me without pondering their meaning too much. I have used this technique in the past to access my subconscious feelings. It turned out that many of the images I paused on featured lone human figures in extreme natural surroundings; environments where the human body cannot survive naturally.

Surrendering to the muse: postcards from lockdown

My burning desire remained to make miniature paintings in my brand new luminous watercolours. I happened to have a few books of Fabriano Postcard watercolour paper available. There was something about the postcard format that appealed to me: the hint of possible travel and its capacity to carry messages beyond my forced incarceration. In the past, I have always used the actual place or my own photographs as references to paint from. Making use of magazine images was a departure from my usual way and alarmed me somewhat. Sailing this close to mere illustration had my academic fine-artist-self protesting: ‘I have a reputation to think of’ and ‘the Gallery will expect more consistency from you’… I ignored this voice and continued to surrender to what delighted and motivated my muse.

Thus, I commenced a ‘vigil’ dedicated to creating in isolation and produced one painting a day over many weeks. The human silence in the first three weeks of lockdown was heavenly: no traffic, no airplanes, and a communal energy of quiet withdrawal in the air. The comforting solitude punctuated by the occasional ringtone or electronic alert mingled with birdsong, a frog choir and the roaring river close by. This symphony of sound was the perfect context for delicate and detailed painting. I felt happy and at peace as my muse took me on an imaginative journey to some of the most extraordinary and far-off places on Earth.

Showing image 18 from Hanien Conradie's series 40DAYS
40DAYS – image 18
Artist: Hanien Conradie © 2020

These places, in relation to the inner places I discovered during this practice, made me consider what best-selling author and former monk, Thomas Moore, says in his book A Religion of One’s Own. Moore suggests that as human beings we know a considerable amount about our external world and that, in comparison, we know very little (maybe too little) about our internal worlds. The images from the National Geographic magazines were mostly about discovering and exploring our external world — not only the Earth and space but also the microcosm. In hindsight, I came to understand that the images I selected were not random at all. They resonated with and expressed the internal states I experienced during lockdown. I became conscious of the inherent wisdom of my muse and subconscious mind.

I have since come to an understanding that periods of isolation are essential for humans in order to cultivate inner stillness. It is important to make time to listen deeply to one’s inner reality and to know its terrain well. In my experience this practice also sensitizes us to be more receptive to the ‘voice’ of the natural world.

When lockdown was finally over, I walked down to the river and it was as if I saw an old and dear friend again after a long time of absence. This little ecosystem on my doorstep was so much more magnificent than ever before. And I delighted in noticing that so much had healed and grown since I had last visited: in the vegetation and birdlife but also within me. This enchanting encounter resulted in another postcard series of 21 portraits of the river, titled ‘My Sanctuary’ (2020), which I made for a South African friend living in the UK.

40 nights / 40 DAYS

Allowing my muse to direct my creative process opened up a more spacious attitude to the flow of life in general and, more concretely, helped me to manifest my desires; in this case 40 small bright coloured paintings. I am now able to ‘hear’ and act on subtle prompts from my creative spirit. One of these ‘nudges’ that came to me was a dissatisfaction with the blankness of the backs of the postcards; where greetings and messages should be. Without text the 40 postcards from lockdown did not seem complete.

I recalled fashion-predictor Li Edelkoort’s podcast about the future of fashion design after Covid19. It was a brilliant talk containing some strange capitalistic approaches to the crisis that I found intriguing. I sent this off to friends and one of them, John Higgins, responded with a voice poem.

Showing image 7 Hanien Conradie's series 40DAYS
40 DAYS – image 7
Artist: Hanien Conradie © 2020

As a writer and academic, John has long been interested in the question of montage — in film, visual media and in writing. As lockdown took hold, John says he found himself, “like many people in the first phase of Covid19 and the ensuing lockdown … overwhelmed by the tsunami of media coverage … [and] at the same time, reading it obsessively as some form of comfort or distraction.” As something of an active response to the increasingly eerie situation, he began to assemble a number of montage texts from the various books, podcasts, news bulletins and online media available within his lockdown environment.

From the talk by Edelkoort, John selected key sentences and put them together in a montage that revealed the underlying philosophical questions in a very humorous way. I sent him a picture of one of my postcard paintings in response. The combination of the text and the picture revealed a fascinating new meaning, which was a delight to both of us. And, unashamedly, I found my muse asking John to join the project.

Thus two parallel projects commenced, each serving as an antidote to calm our anxiety during uncertain times. John created 40 texts and I painted 40 images, independently from each other. Each project maintains a distinct identity when seen in isolation. In my process I selected images from National Geographic magazines, painted them, and — together as a montage — they revealed something about my inner world during this time. One could say that the 40 paintings are reliant on each other to create the meaning (or full picture) of my exploration. John in turn brought together, and set against each other, fragments of national and international news coverage and commentary with other varied readings from his day; also illuminating his questions and thoughts in relation to the pandemic. The 40 texts John crafted can be read separately but are more potent as one long text that leaves one with a sense of the strangeness of the lockdown experience.

Once we completed our separate projects we carefully paired the texts with the paintings. This process took some time, but eventually we settled on some intriguing combinations: some that were easy to understand, and others that created discomfort and ambiguity.

40DAYS-003 image © Hanien Conradie 2020
« of 24 »

Since the images were painted on blank postcards, we decided to incorporate the text as part of each piece. On the reverse of the cards (where address and message are normally written), I give thanks to my inspiration by referencing the National Geographic ‘address’ of the image: the article title, edition, page number and the photographer. In the ‘message’ section of the postcard I ‘performed’ John’s text by transcribing them by hand. The final artwork is thus double-sided and consists of 40 painted images each with its own message on the back.

Because of the double-sided nature of the final work, it was difficult to display the text and painting simultaneously. To solve this, John and I created a printed book titled 40 nights/40 DAYS: from the lockdown. Here we present the text and image together at a glance. This is when what we describe as a ‘third work’ emerges through the viewer, who makes associations and assumptions based on the information gathered from both sources. One could say that the viewer becomes the creator in this ‘third work’.

Our short film presented here, is another attempt to bring this third meaning to life.

40 nights/40 DAYS is a playful project about serious things. We hope it will both delight and provide some solace in these extraordinary times.


Find out more

You can see a different selection from Hanien’s postcard collaboration with John in her contribution to our Quarantine Connection series from April-June 2020. Hanien Conradie: 40 nights / 40 DAYS appeared on Day 36. All 40 images that Hanien used for the series are displayed at her website, and the original paintings are available from the Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. Contact ctgallery@everard.co.za for a portfolio.

Also available for purchase is the hardcover book, 40 nights/40 DAYS: from the lockdown. This can be ordered from Hanien at hanienconradie@gmail.com.

You can listen to the Business of Fashion podcast (27/3/20) featuring futurist Li Edelkoort, which triggered Hanien’s collaboration with John Higgins. The sources from which John took the textual fragments included media coverage from radio, television, and online sources such as Daily Maverick, The Guardian, the Washington Post and the New York Times; Li Edelkoort’s Business of Fashion podcast; and (dusted off and taken down from the bookshelves) Sir Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (T. Noble: London 1845); Plato’s Protagoras and Meno (Penguin: Harmondsworth 1956); John Ruskin’s Modern Painters Volume 1 (Dent: London 1935); John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (George Allen: London 1906).

Hanien Conradie
Hanien Conradie
A fine artist concerned with place and belonging, informed by the cosmology of African animism within the complex human and other-than-human networks that encompass a landscape.
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Disciplinary Agnosticism and Engaging with Ecologies of Place

Artist and researcher Iain Biggs discusses Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, his new co-authored book about the possibilities of creative work, ensemble practices and disciplinary agnosticism in seeking alternative and inclusive ways of belonging to this world.


2,250 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes 


In December 2020, and after a great many years of work, Mary Modeen’s and my book Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies finally appeared. This post aims to give some idea of what sort of book this is, along with some idea of how, and why, it has the content it does.

Calling for disciplinary agnosticism
Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place, by Mary Modeen & Iain Biggs

As we make clear from the start, and despite the sixty-eight colour images of works we referred to, it’s not really an ‘art book’, at least in the usual sense. Instead, it’s a book about the possibilities of ‘ensemble practices’, creative work viewed as drawing on concerns found in art, education, issues of place and what Felix Guattari calls ecosophy. Nor is it a book of theory, although it deals with a wide range of ideas from many different disciplines. Our central aim is to encourage readers, whatever their background, to understand their particular skills and knowledge in larger, intra-related contexts so as to contribute to the ‘joined-up’ thinking and action necessary to face the global changes now taking place. We’re not interested in providing an argument based on a set of specialist practices or a particular form of disciplinary or interdisciplinary thinking. Instead, like Donna Haraway, we want to encourage readers to find practical, creative ways to ‘stay with the trouble’ in all its many dimensions.        

Towards ‘placed-ness’

So, a brief outline of the book’s contents. Chapter One outlines the basis of our position and, in particular, considers the importance of three geo-poetic thinkers to our concerns — Gary Snyder, Kenneth White, and Robert Frodeman. This also allows us to distinguish their approaches from our own. Chapter Two goes back to fundamentals by considering how we take in the world through our senses. It takes the reader on an imagined walk so as to explore the relationship between embodiment and place, the visible and the invisible, the phenomenological and the numinous. Chapter Three then sets out what we mean by slow residency and explains why we don’t offer a single definition of deep mapping. It then outlines a possible pre-history of deep mapping and gives examples of current practice.

Disciplinary agnosticism
‘Queen Bee and Mobile Hive performance’, Buzz Lab interns, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota, 2017.
Photo: Christine Baeumler

Chapter Four is based on a long interview about her work with Christine Baeumler, an artist, environmental educator, community activist, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. Her collaborative work with both her local community and Dakota people living in Minneapolis St Paul resulted in a number of land reclamation projects, including transforming an abandoned railway marshalling-yard into what is now the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary. Her recent Buzz Lab project with young people employed as paid interns created a pollinator garden and developed strategies to highlight the socio-environmental value of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. Chapter Five investigates the values inherent in perception, and especially as this is central to the ways in which place is perceived. In it, the processes by which the threads of cultural value relating to a particular site generate understanding are unpicked.

Chapter Six looks at questions around collaboration. It includes a look at the gap between the idea of ‘interdisciplinary research’ and the way interdisciplinary collaborations tend to work out in practice. Here we’re concerned with the ways the presuppositions of the knowledge industry distort collaboration to maintain the status quo. As an alternative, we discuss what we call ‘creative communities of practice’. Importantly, it includes a shortened version of the South African artist, environmental researcher, and writer Hanien Conradie’s text The Voice of Water: Re-sounding a Silenced River, which provides a compelling example of collaboration with the more-than-human.

Chapter Seven consists of eleven examples of practices that offer inclusive and open creative approaches to a range of current concerns. Approaches that, for example, embrace the complexities of living in a world that has become inexorably multicultural, while also respecting and valuing the local, the specific, and the idiosyncratic. Chapter Eight is based on exchanges with the Australian designer, landscape researcher, curator, and educator Gini Lee. Her Stony Rises deep mapping work is representative of an inclusive, relational approach to issues of place and environment that has informed her numerous collaborations, enabling her to explore possibilities across a wide variety of conventionally disparate roles.

Chapter Nine draws on extensive conversations between Mary Modeen and  Alexander and Susan Maris, who live and work at Kinlock Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands. We see their work as enacting the vital materialism proposed by Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and others; an inclusive approach that makes possible what Donna Haraway calls ‘tentacular thinking’. Chapter Ten, ‘Fieldwork Reconsidered, is a plea for more holistic and grounded approaches to creative learning in its fullest sense. For a shift away from what Geraldine Finn calls “high altitude thinking” towards direct experience and awareness of our placed-ness. Towards a better understanding of knowledge as embodied, enacted, and always subject to the contingencies of human and more-than-human worlds. And towards a more open awareness that attends to multiple voices in different registers and differently placed. A fieldwork, then, that’s enacted in and through our active awareness of the porosity of the human and more-than-human, of place and time, of self and community.

Disciplinary agnosticism

Now for the ‘how’ and ‘why’. The Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub pointed out in 1990 that we have an unrealistic view of the work of both scientists and artists. Work that, in both cases, is actually located within a small, subtle, largely confined — if at times pervasive — domain with regard to society as a whole. Furthermore, both scientists and artists are, for much of their times, actually engaged in a whole variety of other, more mundane and everyday roles and activities. Against the assumption that the artistic or scientific mentality is a singular, exceptional and all-consuming role, Holub suggests an alternative view. Rather than the current overemphasis on the different practices and methodologies of scientists and artists, he focuses on their need to acknowledge that these differences are insignificant compared to their common obligations. ‘Obligation’ Mary and I paraphase as the need to obtain, and act on the basis of, an informed understanding of the distinct but intra-related ecologies of selfhood, the social, and the environmental. Recognising that common obligation is a key element of the inclusivity of ensemble practices.

However, developing an ensemble practice requires an agnostic attitude towards the realpolitik that underwrites the authority that disciplines and professions claim in relation to the production and circulation of knowledge. An agnosticism that allows us to separate the ‘use value’ of specialist knowledge from the intellectual and social power of categorisation and exclusion derived from it. Disciplinary agnosticism is basically a strategy to by-pass what sociologists of knowledge see as the way in which dominant forms of knowledge production are able to insist that all other knowledge claims be judged according to the dominant set of criteria. In extreme cases, this means that nothing recognisable as knowledge can be produced outside of the socially dominant form. Put briefly, disciplinary agnosticism insists on what Isabelle Stengers and other thinkers call a “decolonization of thought”. So how did we arrive at this position?

A carrier bag theory of ensemble praxis

Disciplinary agnosticism - Listening at the Borders
Iain Biggs Hidden War (with and for Anna Biggs) from Iain Biggs ‘”Listening at the Borders” introduction, acknowledgements (and an intervention) in Iain Biggs, ed. Debatable Lands Vol. 2. These Debatable Lands (Bristol, Wild Conversations Press, 2009).
Photo Iain Biggs

The archaeologist and anthropologist Barbara Bender’s work, like that of her friend the political geographer Doreen Massey, show that:

“landscapes refuse to be disciplined. They make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time [History] and space [Geography], or between nature [Science] and culture [Social Anthropology]”
(quoted in Doreen Massey 2006: ’Landscape as a Provocation: Reactions on Moving Mountains’. Journal of Material Culture. 11(33), p. 33).

This understanding is complemented by the polymath Cliff McLucas, a key figure in the development of deep mapping, who writes in There are ten things I can say about these deep maps that deep maps should: “bring together the amateur and the professional, the artist and the scientist, the official and the unofficial, the national and the local”. In her chapter ‘The Politics of Spirituality. The Spirituality of Politics’ in Why Althusser Killed His Wife: Essays on Discourse and Violence, 1996, the feminist philosopher Geraldine Finn identifies the tension between that shared obligation and a form of reason preoccupied with categorisation. She states that:

“…the contingent and changing concrete world always exceeds the ideal categories of thought within which we attempt to express and contain it. And the same is true of people. We are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us.”

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points to the profoundly negative social consequences of over-emphasis on the categorical; it’s encouraging and enabling ‘othering’ by promoting an ethically neutral ‘objective detachment’. One that erodes what Hannah Arendt calls the animal pity by which all normal persons are affected in the presence of physical suffering and, in addition, has estranged us from all other-than-human life.

Lastly, Bruno Latour supports the link between disciplinary agnosticism and the ability of ensemble practices to help renegotiate the relationship between local and global when he writes:

“What counts is not knowing whether you are for or against globalisation, for or against the local; all that counts is understanding whether you are managing to register, to maintain, to cherish, a maximum number of alternative ways of belonging to the world”.
(Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime 2018 pp. 15-16).

Both disciplinary agnosticism and ensemble practices assume a particular sense of self that’s constituted in and through relationships, attachments, and connections. Our understanding here draws on the psychoanalytic thinking of Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Felix Guattari, the post-Jungians James Hillman and Mary Watkins, the artist-turned-anthropologist A. David Napier, and the sociologists of religion Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead. I don’t have the space to enlarge on this here but, if you want the detail, it’s set out in a chapter on ‘Ensemble Practices’ in the recently published Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm.

So, finally, who is this book written for? When we were writing, I had in mind the  various very different individuals I’d helped navigate creative Masters and Doctoral projects. Individuals who, while they share a desire to understand and transform some aspect of the material world, have surprisingly little else in common. Drawing on Ursula K Le Guin’s recently republished essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, I’d like to hope that we’ve assembled the beginnings of a ‘carrier bag theory of ensemble praxis’, one that will be able to hasten the end of the deeply problematic story that, to borrow from Le Guin again, might be called ‘The Ascent of Man as Hero’. I hope that, instead, we can encourage readers to engage with another, less toxic and more inclusive, story. The one about how we can each best learn to register, maintain, and cherish as many alternative and inclusive ways of belonging to this Terrestrial world as possible.


Find out more

Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies, by Mary Modeen & Iain Biggs is published by Routledge (2021). 

Iain’s coauthor, Mary Modeen, is Professor of Contemporary Art Practice at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. She is an artist/academic whose research links creative practice with interdisciplinary academic studies in the humanities, particularly philosophy, literature, feminist and indigenous studies. Her work usually combines creative art practice and writing.

Five Notes on Thinking Through ‘Ensemble Practices’, Iain’s previous post for ClimateCultures, introduces ideas of ensemble creative practices to describe how the work of Christine Baeumler incorporates a multiplicity of roles and skills, illustrating “an individual’s mycelial entanglement in multiple, interconnected tasks, connectivities and interdependences, all of which will, to a greater or lesser extent, involve creativity understood inclusively.” Iain’s chapter on ‘Ensemble Practices’ appears in the Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm, edited by Cameron Cartiere & Leon Tan (Routledge, 2021).

Iain mentions the work of fellow ClimateCultures member Hanien Conradie, a fine artist concerned with place and belonging, informed by the cosmology of African animism within the complex human and other-than-human networks that encompass a landscape. Her ClimateCultures post Writing on Water shares a collaborative film of her ritual encounter with the River Dart in Devon and her work with places where nothing seemingly remains of their ancient knowledge — including The Voice of Water: Re-sounding a Silenced River, which Iain refers to.

Iain also mentions Ursula Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Fellow ClimateCultures member Philip Webb Gregg also discusses this essay — where “Le Guin explores the idea of the bag being the oldest human tool. In doing so, she is able to show how the stories we’ve been told our entire lives have deceived and misled us.” — in A Personal History of the Anthropocene – Three Objects #12, his contribution to our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.

You can explore ideas and examples of geopoetics through the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and its journal Stravaig — where ClimateCultures member James Murray-White is one of the editors.

Iain Biggs
Iain Biggs
An independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place seen through the lens of Felix Guattari's ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications.
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You, Small Creatures, Big Monsters

Video artist Mirjamsvideos shares reflective artworks which subtly demonstrate our relationship with the world, using ugliness in trash and beauty in small things to overcome our lack of insight into systems we’ve made toxic to ourselves and others.


2,060 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes + 9 mins video


Mission accomplished: my art made somebody cry.

You read it in the art books, in the intellectual words of curators, art historians: art has the power to change the world! But when you are in the artist’s shoes sometimes it is difficult to see if your work has any effect at all.

First of all, the amount of visuals created is overwhelming, so that sometimes even the most important or stunning messages are hardly being seen. Then, nowadays many important venues for artists’ exposure, like festivals and group exhibitions, call for payment just to submit your work for the selection process. The highest submission fee I have seen so far was €350. Here in Portugal that can be more than half the monthly salary of someone with a full-time job. And last, even if you get the exposure, how often does a visual artist receive the message: “Hey, your artwork really changed my life!”?

A still from YOU, a film
mirjamsvideos © 2020

Being an artist in love with the natural world it is heartbreaking to see its man-made destruction, and overwhelming to become aware of all the issues we are up against. But worst of all, seeing how little aware people are of the harm we do and how little some seem to care makes me feel lost as to what I could possibly do to spark a change in people’s minds. And then, these words appeared:

“Such a powerful metaphor … to convey such an important message. I cried and although to be really honest I do cry a lot … I cried because I feel the same and you express it beautifully.”… “Thank you for making us think about such a huge issue in such a delicate and poetic way and for reminding us that no matter how bad and tragic the situation is we keep going and we keep going for love ❤️ “

This message appeared after I posted a work of video art that deals with the problem of pollution in Portugal: forests, parks and streets filled with trash.

Trash - a still from mirjamsvideos' film YOU
A still from YOU – a film
mirjamsvideos © 2020

I also cried a bit, just because it was so good to know that yes, the work did have an impact, I am making a difference! But it also showed that sometimes the effect of an artwork is of a more subtle nature than to see people sign up for environmental volunteering the next day or pledge not to use plastic bags anymore. It can be more like just another drop in a slowly filling bucket. And without these drops, perhaps the bucket would never fill…

A message for my fellow artists: Keep going, you’re doing important and amazing work!

A still from mirjamsvideos's film YOU
A still from YOU – a film
mirjamsvideos © 2020

Trash & our toxic system

And here are some words about the work of art that placed a few drops in a few buckets.

As you might have read in my ClimateCultures profile, my road to becoming an environmental artivist was a bit, let’s say, controversial. But it also is a great example of the lack of insight we have into the harm that we actually do (at times even when we think we do good). Our education isn’t actually providing us with an honest view, and neither does it focus on what is important for us to know to create a better life on this planet.

For example, I remember that, in my very early teens, I found an explanation in a schoolbook for why the poor nations in the world are poor. It was said that their geographic areas had fewer resources and therefore they had not been able to develop like us in the western world. Now, in the second half of my thirties, I am reading a book — Ecofeminism, by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies — that provides quite a different explanation: it is our western lifestyle that is keeping the rest of the world poor.

Though we are educated to see colonialism as something of the past, it is still very alive today. Some now call it capitalism or patriarchy and there are other names. It steals healthy lands from people to then fully deplete and toxify them. It grows food that is unhealthy for our bodies. It sells clothing created by and filled with chemicals that are making our rivers (our drinking water) unfit for life. It makes us buy makeup for which, in a faraway land, little girls have died in mines and that is sold in loads of packaging — like all of its other products — that we then dispose of improperly, leaving cities and natural areas littered with trash.

In Grande Lisboa in Portugal, where I live, trash flies freely through the streets, in parks, forests, rivers. It’s very painful to see that people care so little, that people cannot see the harm that they do to themselves, but most importantly, to all life that is innocent, that had no share in our destructive ways.

YOU — a film of a relationship 

YOU is the story of how I managed to deal with this ugliness in my world; from denial to panic, to sadness to finding an enormous piece of trash floating in the stream in front of my house that I couldn’t bear to look at anymore, so I jumped into the water and took it out.

In the last months, besides dreamy landscapes that seem to pass by in slow-motion, scenes that come to me naturally, I started to document the trash lying around. My videos are often characterised by still and long shots in which subtle, real-time movement creates a hint of time passing by, of a story wanting to be told. I first attempted to get this effect from the trash as well. But since trash is often blown around until it reaches windless corners, there was not much movement there to be seen. Even flies would fly away when I arrived.

It made me realise that the trash had to be shown in a different way, it had to make a real contrast with the beautiful: I had to create ugly scenes! Actually, I already had ugly scenes, for I sometimes forget to turn off my camera before taking it off the tripod and putting it back in my bag. These wild and messy accidental shots were perfect to portray the panic and disorientation erupting from a brutal attack on one’s safe and pretty world.

Next to that, I started to shoot many photographs of the trash, for these could be easily edited into fast flashing scenes, like suppressed memories that uninvitedly pop up.

The film is divided into six parts. The first is a beautiful and joyful day in which everything seems perfect and innocent. In the second, the problem really shows itself but is waved away like a bad dream. But the third day is taken over by trash and ugliness, panic and disorientation, followed by the fourth part: a time of feeling completely defeated.

A still from YOU – a film
mirjamsvideos © 2020


The narration is inspired by a sense — beautifully voiced by writers like Bhai Vir Singh or Rabindranath Tagore — that the relationship one has with the world is similar to that of a relationship between lovers. The world being the other that you desire to see, hear and dance with. Part five therefore is the lover calling back the other who thinks love had been lost. The love is still there, but some mature and responsible action has to be taken for the love to flourish again. And once this has been done, we arrive at the closing part: a happy ending. Because, although I know that the health of the planet is in a really bad condition, I have to believe that we can still save her. Without that belief, I would be practically dead.

So, is my short film going to save the world? No. Much more action is needed. Most importantly information, awareness, needs to spread. As mentioned before, we are dealing with an incredible lack of insight. Information on the harmful effects of our trash on the planet, on ourselves, is not well spread, or not communicated in a way that people can really relate it to their day-to-day life. A lot of work still has to be done, in this and other areas. This little film was just a little start…

YOU – Environmental Shortfilm, Experimental Video Art from mirjamsvideos on Vimeo.

Small creatures and big monsters

When one sets off on the journey to save the world, she opens up a whole new world for you!

I began to see that despite all the nonsense that we do to her, she keeps nurturing all of life, even us. I got a different understanding of the concepts ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Mother Nature’ and started to regard these words with more respect, for really only a mother can love like that.

Snail - a still from mirjamsvideos' film Small Creatures and Big Monsters
A still from Small Creatures and Big Monsters – a film
mirjamsvideos © 2020

It also awakened a more nurturing, more motherly aspect in me, once again seeing the small things around me and those that need our help and our protection.

Imagine you had to move around like a snail; delicately touching the world around you with your tentacles, eyes that can stretch out above your head, sliding a large part of your body over the ground, a wall, a rooftop, possibly feeling every little bump and crack beneath you. A gush of wind is like a storm for you, a kilometre could be a whole country, it could be all you will ever see…

It would be quite a different world, right? When you would actually be in contact with your surroundings…

The greatest challenge about making this work was to get a good shot of loads of cars flashing by. Not only because this is just not my cup of tea, but also because I made this work during Covid times when there weren’t a lot of cars out in the streets.

During this time of silence and billboards not changing every week, and after the fear of running out of food had faded away, a serenity entered into my mind and it became easier to see the small, almost still, but sublime beauty that daily life silently presents us with.

Snails are such magical creatures for me and I can observe them for hours. They live in a beautiful dance of elegant clumsiness, seem completely immersed into the world, masters of mindfulness, yet they look like children innocently discovering what happens around them.

They are the antithesis of the common man: stamping around in thick-soled sporty shoes, slamming several doors behind them, turning a key and speeding away, not for a fraction of a second touching the world.

small creatures and big monsters – experimental video art / shortfilm / nature video from mirjamsvideos on Vimeo.

Not only have we gotten disconnected from the world, but also from ourselves. As much as the ‘great thinkers’ of old wanted to release humans from their animal selves, and despite the fact that nowadays some of us have mechanical body parts or were even created outside of the womb, we continue to be biological creatures. It’s nature that keeps us alive.

Maybe if we’d be a bit more like the snails, we could reconnect a little. Our experience of life and each other could be like a clumsy dance of elegance. We would not throw disposable masks, batteries and random trash anywhere on the ground, because that is neither elegant nor clumsy, that is just stupid.


Find out more

Ecofeminism, by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, is published by Zed Books (2014: 20th-anniversary edition).

You can explore some of the poetry of Bhai Vir Singh and Rabindranath Tagore in translation at Poem Hunter

On the subject of pollution from plastic and other trash, you might read Mike Hembury‘s  ClimateCultures post, Coastline Project — Sailing Under Wolf Island’s Baleful Gaze. And on our relationship with other creatures there is In the Path of Its Beam, my review of Annie Dillard’s classic book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There’s much to explore on these and other topics throughout our blog, of course!

Mirjamsvideos
Mirjamsvideos
A video artist documenting little wonders that come our way and the pure beauty of daily life, which is all dances of subtle change over time.
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Art Photography — Emotional Response to Global Crisis

Photographer Veronica Worrall explores how art can offer an important emotional response to global pandemic and climate crises, sharing her ‘lockdown’ project to generate images where photography partners with natural processes to produce a visual essay of optimism.


1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes


In the early months of Covid-19 lockdown I found an escape in an azure canopy. I mentally soared over my garden, taking refuge in the exquisite beauty of the empty skies. I found solace from the devastating pandemic. The budding leaves and blossoms showed themselves with exuberance against a royal blue which dimmed elegantly to the horizon. An occasional wisp of cloud offered a sense of distance — a dream hovering. Humanity was facing disaster and yet my garden was thriving. I was being torn between relief that nature was being given a chance and the tragedy that was unfolding across the globe. Like many I turned to capturing images of my garden’s beauty whilst I confronted human mortality.

I was reminded of the very first photographs which were taken to convey a state of mind, the work of Alfred Stieglitz. In 1922 and again 1923 to 1934 Stieglitz made photographic series initially called Songs of the Sky and later Equivalents. Stieglitz had a tumultuous affair through these years with the artist Georgia O’Keefe. He pointed his camera skywards “purposely disorientating”, purposely seeking to take his viewer to his own emotional state. The resultant images of clouds, more than 200, were Stieglitz’s equivalent of his emotions, what Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais has described — in his book accompanying the 2018 ‘Shape of Light Exhibition’ at the Tate Modern London — as “his inner resonance of the chaos in (his) world and his relationship to that chaos”. De l’Ecotais goes on to discuss the exhibited samples of the Equivalent images, suggesting that Stieglitz’s work, although not strictly abstract, was the forerunner of photography moving out from being a purely representative medium. This led the way for photographers to experiment with their own ‘equivalents’. They worked to convey creatively their own emotion following other artists of that time, such as O’Keefe, who were exploring how visual art might evoke the same emotional response as music.

So it is no surprise that many photographers during our 21st-century global pandemic have looked to portray their own psychological state. I was drawn to the skies to express both my joy and fear.

Emotional response and global crisis

This is not the first time in stressful moments that I have used the sky as a haven from my extreme emotions. For example, I took photographs following a Force 10 storm in the Arctic Sea after the boat on which I travelled responded to a Mayday callout. Eventually the other boat was found tucked into a safe anchorage and no one was lost, but the relief was short.

Showing Veronica Worrall's arctic photograph, 'Storm Passing'
Figure 1 – Storm Passing
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2017
Showing Veronica Worrall's arctic photograph, 'Storm Over'
Figure 2 – Storm Over
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2017

During this trip, I personally witnessed the extent of climate change. These photographs taken after the storm hold both my relief but also my fear of imminent danger. They spoke to me of a unique moment of time and space, when disaster can be averted. And so it was, one evening three years later, in the early days of our global pandemic, the sky outside my front door symbolised both my dread and my hope. My photograph I called Optimistic Outlook

Emotional response to climate crisis: Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Optimistic Outlook'
Figure 3 – Optimistic Outlook
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020

The image responds

This was a moment when my photography became an ‘art’ aesthetic. The importance of the image was the philosophy involved and my eye’s attempt (quoting George Clarke’s book, The Photograph) “to transform the most obvious of things into its unique potential” — an art equivalent. This image captured my passionate hope that we come through this global chaos with a deeper understanding of how humanity needs to change radically to avoid the predicted tipping point that would result in global chaos, set out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 special report, Impacts of 1.5ºC of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems.  

Two months later, May’s warmth filtered into my garden, I was taking refuge in the blossom against perfect blue. I became mesmerised by the delicate beauty. I was not the only one. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram evidenced a burgeoning re-connection between people and the natural world. How could this be sustained? How could we stay reconnected?

Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Images Return'
Figure 4 – Images Return
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020

This thought seeded my ‘lockdown project’, a continuation of my earlier exploration of partnering with natural processes to make art, in ‘Project Unseen’. My photographs of blue skies and blossom were returned to the trees and left for months, as shown in the image above. Nature’s elements and creatures traced over my images. Whilst monitoring my images attached to the trees a few months later, I noticed the skies overhead were becoming crisscrossed with vapour trails as lockdown relaxed. The sky was symbolising my concern that lessons were not being learnt in a rush to return to unsustainable travel and consumer trading.

Showing Veronica Worrall's arctic photograph, 'Harbinger'
Figure 5 – Harbinger
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020

Reconnected in hope

Nevertheless, I was determined to continue with my ‘lockdown’ project. My ‘strung up’ photographs were taking a battering in a gale and many images had been significantly degraded — a layer of metaphor. I retrieved them and, although feeling despondent, I decided for this project I would not dwell on dark messaging but use these images as a visual essay of optimism — semi abstracts, my ‘Equivalents’ of hope. I would strive to stay positive in a time of chaos. The images Hope 1 to 5 are part of my project ‘Stay Reconnected’.

Emotional response to climate crisis: Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Hope'
Figure 6 – Hope
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020
Emotional response to climate crisis: Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Hope 2'
Figure 7 – Hope
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020
Emotional response to climate crisis: Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Hope 3 Passing'
Figure 8 – Hope 3 Passing
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020
Emotional response to climate crisis: Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Hope 4'
Figure 9 – Hope 4
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020
Emotional response to climate crisis: Showing Veronica Worrall's photograph, 'Hope 5'
Figure 10 – Hope 5
Photograph: Worrall, V.M. © 2020

Together Nature and I created colourful art pieces, symbolic of the much-needed partnership. We convey the joyful reconnection many had found in our gardens, parks and wayside walks. The images hold my hope for the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill presented to the UK Parliament on 2nd September. This is the direction needed to preserve nature’s systems and diversity for future generations.

In past weeks the youngsters have returned to their studies preparing for their futures. Holidays are over and across the world Covid-19 cases are surging upwards again. Chaos is reported across trade and travel industries subjected to a conflicting renewal of government restrictions. The sky has returned to a dome of deep blue, wearing again its symbolic robe — asking us to revisit what is important. More than ever cooperative wisdom is required. Is it possible for our world leaders to collaborate on strategies, policies and practices that allow humanity to stay re-connected to the essence of our existence — the essence captured on cameras as trees blossomed under clear blue skies? 


Find out more

There is more on Veronica’s ‘Stay Connected‘ project and her earlier ‘Project Unseen‘ at her website.

You can see some of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series at the Met Museum’s online collection. As the note there explains, “In these purposely disorienting and nearly abstract images, Stieglitz sought to arouse in the viewer the emotional equivalent of his own state of mind at the time he took the picture and to show that the content of a photograph was different from its subject. The Equivalents trace Stieglitz’s emotional response to nature through periods of ecstasy and darkness, romantic engagement, and confronting mortality.”

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography & Abstract Art, by Simon Baker, Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais and Shoair Mavlian, is published by Tate Publishing (2018).

The Photograph, by George Clarke, is published by Oxford University Press (1997), in their Oxford History of Art series.

Impacts of 1.5oC of Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems is published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018).  Michael Marshall’s recent piece in The Guardian (19/9/20) discusses The tipping points at the heart of the climate crisis.

You can follow progress (hopefully) on the UK Parliament’s Climate and Ecology Bill 2019-21, in the Parliamentary Business Progress. It is a Private Members’ Bill, presented by Green MP Caroline Lucas, “to require the Prime Minister to achieve climate and ecology objectives; to give the Secretary of State a duty to create and implement a strategy to achieve those objectives; to establish a Citizens’ Assembly to work with the Secretary of State in creating that strategy; to give duties to the Committee on Climate Change regarding the objectives and strategy”, and is due to be debated in its Second Reading in Parliament in March 2021.

You might also explore other artistic examples of emotional response to the climate crisis, for example in Deborah Tomkins’s ClimateCultures post Grief, Hope and Writing Climate Change. And in an interesting ‘working document’, Belonging and Imagination in the Anthropocene: A Social Action Art Therapy Response to Climate Crisis, Jamie Bird of the Centre for Health and Social Care Research at Derby University, addresses cognitive and emotional responses to climate crisis. He draws on experiences using “imagination and the concept of belonging in work with those who have experienced political and domestic violence” to propose how social action art therapy can offer a way of meeting the “intersecting forces that flow into and out of climate crisis”. He has also written about this research approach in a post for the university website (23/01/20), Climate anxiety: How can we process our emotional responses to climate crisis?

Veronica Worrall
Veronica Worrall
An experimental artist using photography to capture movement, time and natural processes, working with nature and traditional alternative photography in attempts to reduce her artist footprint ...
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On Green Verges

Writer Julian Bishop, living on the very edge of the metropolis, found a fascination with local verges during Covid-19 lockdown — and their previously unregarded nature took up residency in his imagination, leading him to a poetic challenge.


 1,210 words: estimated reading time = 5 minutes


Odd, but lockdown opened up the world for me more than closing it down. I live on the very edge of London (High Barnet, actually) in what we joke is the last road in London. Two minutes’ drive away, houses give way to fields and woods before being reined in by the M25. A true green belt.

Being a busy London-sort, my direction of travel used to be either by car to another conurbation or by Tube into a metropolis. Oh, I’d walk to the gym to do a treadmill run and take the dog around the block. Lots of treadmills to choose from, in fact.

And then all the treadmills stopped. My regular journeys into London, aimless shopping trips, poetry readings, my regular contemporary poetry workshop in Enfield — all ground to a halt almost overnight.

The lack of a gym was easy to fix — I started to run (and walk the dog) through the mysterious green acres I’d dismissed as ‘not real countryside’. And gradually my forays extended deeper and deeper, further and further.

Life on the verges

I discovered a bluebell wood, a marvellous open space called charmingly Saffron Green, an ancient yew wood, a stream I never knew existed, which is a source of Dollis Brook… I could go on. And when I ran along the roads, I started to look down and around rather than straight ahead. I became obsessed with the verges — so many wildflowers and verge-dwellers giving their presence away with little quivers in the grass.

Showing verges at Saffron Green, Herts
Living verges – Saffron Green
Photograph: Julian Bishop © 2020

And I began to notice what fellow ClimateCultures member Dave Hubble described in his recent blog as “the beauty in ugliness”, particularly on the unloved verges with their dramatic stands of hemlock, beefy cow parsleys and diverse grasses. My run takes me alongside a short stretch of the A1, which foamed with hemlock in June — how many motorists realised they were driving through a natural toxic cloud? And what I ran or walked past every day slowly took up residency in my head.

All this while, I’d been responding to lockdown through poetry. I decided to take up the challenge set by fellow poet Jacqueline Saphra (whose Poetry School classes I used to attend pre-covid) who decided to write a sonnet a day. I think I lasted about three days… and Jacqui went on to write a hundred (she’s been recording them and putting them up on Twitter).

The Sonnet Room

But I managed a couple of dozen — and noticed, as they developed, the predictable themes about missing loved ones and fear of the future gave way to these unremarkable and unloved stalwarts of the natural world. I took notes for what I called my ‘Sonnet Room’, which I decorated with all these wonderful so-called ‘weeds’. I dreamt of bittersweet, common hogweeds. The bluebell wood earned a sonnet of its own — as did Saffron Green, which was published as part of Hertfordshire’s Community Archives project.

Showing bluebell woods
Bluebell woods
Photograph: Julian Bishop © 2020

Some of these new poems I’ve included in a submission for a pamphlet that I’m hoping to get illustrated and printed.

And other poems presented themselves beyond the sonnet form: a sunbathing grass snake spotted one day on the road verge, crawling over a pile of laughing-gas canisters; a hedgehog (sadly knocked over); the binbag-strewn ditches; a bramble next to a fly-tip, with the biggest blackberries I’ve ever seen…

So lockdown was (excuse the pun) an extremely fruitful time as a poet — and now I’m hooked. What will the bluebell wood look like in the dead of winter? Saffron Green frosted? The stream in flood? How will the verges look next year when the council cutters come back with a vengeance?

Saffron Green

I discovered it on a run – something
I’d never done before, exploring
the richer world hidden beyond
the front door. Pasture turned
into woodland until it was layer
upon layer of primrose, anemone,
paths tickled with white comfrey,
finches in trees, just feet away
from the A1. I watched the conceit
of exhausted lives in the fast lane
rush by, the tang of arcane
carbon in its wake, now obsolete
as packed tubes or nine to five
and I was astounded to be alive.

 

The Hunt

Such silent nights – roads breathless
as if they were infected. What we’d lost –
constant traffic, the drizzle of exhaust –
invisible and insidious as asbestos
or the virus itself. Then a blood-clabbering
sound emerged: a nightly chorus,
foxes hollering like a hunt in reverse –
as if hounded animals were fighting
back. A beastly untameable disease
stalked the streets while humans retreated
like quarry to a den, our vulnerabilities
sniffed out by a hungry meat-eater.
Lives on pause for weeks – it smacked
of wild animals getting their own back.

 

Rush Hour

One month in and a wild rush hour
quickened along the verges, nature
slamming down hard on the accelerator –
rigs of cow parsley towered
over kerbs in Galley Lane, exploding
into stars, rivers of bluebells lapped
against the tarmac on a surge of sap
fuelled by a million lost springs.
Dandelions had no time to turn clocks
into ashes when the lockdown stopped.
Air charged with birdsong soured
in the roar of a more familiar rush hour;
when strimmers returned to crew-cut
the verges, all our new rivers dried up.

Poems © Julian Bishop 2020


Find out more

Julian previously contributed The Hunt for Day 21 of our Quarantine Connection series, and some of his recent poems appear in a chapbook anthology, Poems for the Planet, alongside three other contributors: Maggie Butt, Sarah Doyle and Cheryl Moskowitz. Julian says: “The four of us launched it just a couple of weeks before lockdown at the Faversham Literary Festival in Kent, sharing a bill that included Jenny Eclair, Ken Livingstone and Everything But the Girl singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn. Our London launch was at Christ Church in Southgate which is registered as an Eco Church with A Rocha (an international network of environmental organisations with a Christian ethos).” Poems for the Planet is available from Maggie Butt’s website.

Julian mentioned Dave Hubble’s ClimateCultures post, On Re-emergence and the Avoidance of Clichés, where Dave comments: “I am forever intrigued by the idea of finding beauty in that which is not typically considered beautiful.”

Hertfordshire’s Community Archives project published Julian’s poem Saffron Green on their community website Herts Memories, in July 2020.

You can find Jacqueline Saphra’s sonnets on Twitter, and more information on 100 days of sonnets: unlocking that maddening door at her website. See The Poetry School for their courses, including with Jacqueline.

UK charity Plantlife has published a Good Verge Guide – a different approach to managing our waysides and verges (2016) and a guide to plant life on our road verges, Road verges – Last refuge for some of our rarest wild flowers and plants (2017). They are currently running their Road Verge Campaign: “If all the UK’s road verges were managed according to our guidelines, there could be 400 billion more flowers, equivalent to an extra quarter of a million acres of meadow. Just imagine!”

Julian Bishop
Julian Bishop
A former journalist, environment reporter and tv news editor who writes poetry about eco issues and was runner-up in the 2018 Ginkgo Poetry Prize.
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