Fiona Jack: Riverbed, 2018. Workshop space, 2018. Image: Monique Redmond, 2018
Extract:
"In February 2018 Fiona Jack opened the exhibition Our Red Aunt at the Glasgow Women’s Library in Scotland. Centered around the artist’s Great Grand Aunt, the Scottish suffragette and radical communist Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954), Our Red Aunt employed collaborative artistic strategies to create a shared re-engagement with Crawfurd’s life work.
Riverbed continues the reflection on shared political narratives established in Our Red Aunt, while embedding the development of the Riverbed project within a network of communities here in Aotearoa. Fiona Jack views activist and social justice advocate Sue Bradford as a contemporary counterpart of Helen Crawfurd, and has developed the Riverbed project in close conversation with her.
Since 1999 Bradford has been working as a member of the education-based social justice collective, Kotare Trust. Based in Wellsford, the trust provides a physical space and the pedagogical resources for reflective, collaborative learning. Aiming to assist others to ‘regard the world with clear vision, speak with a strong voice and act with a bold heart’ Kotare Trust works to proactively support the wairua of those working at the coalface of social transformation. Fiona Jack and Sue Bradford have facilitated a series of workshops at Artspace NZ and Kotare over the winter months of 2018. During each workshop participants have been invited to shape rocks from a variety of clays while engaging in facilitated group discussion around a topical issue. Emerging out of these dialogues among many hands and voices, each rock included in this exhibition could be considered to carry an echo of collective thought within its vibrant matter. Together the rocks become a socially formed lithosphere.
Through the dialogic nature of this process, Jack and Bradford prioritise our political present as one in which listening and action are both embodied and intersubjective, where the experiences we each draw on can find shared value. By working in this way they place emphasis on listening, engagement and the exchange of knowledge as being at the heart of any true potential for social and political transformation."
I am interested in the initiation of group conversation through artwork or installation through looking at Fiona Jack's work, and whether the bringing together of a people to make discourse is more important to her work or whether it is the outcome of that conversation, which are the shaped rocks from clay, laid out in the space. I like how the process very much happens in the gallery space, where the installation becomes built by a collective of strangers/outside people coming together in a joint activity, which also results in an outcome that is the 'exhibition.' How can these two types of convos and treatments of the gallery space become carried out in an interesting and productive way? There are almost two types of audiences: first the participators that help make the exhibition by engaging in making, then the viewers that see the made works in a post-workshop setting. In relation, i'm interested to understand further on what levels of participation from the audience do my own works offer, and how i can mediate these different levels and different 'types' of audiences that engage with my work in a gallery setting.
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Article from Wikipedia that explains 'deep ecology' as separate to 'mainstream environmentalism' -just an interesting piece of text that explains the general differences in those ideologies - i feel looking at wikipedia articles is a good way of seeing what people are saying about these themes/what the general perspectives are...plus it helps me pick out terms that i can explore later through more thorough, opinionated or angled/personalised sources via looking at the particular writers/theoreticians the articles cite.
"Deep ecology"
"Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy which promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, plus the restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas.
Deep ecology argues that the natural world is a complex of relationships in which the existence of organisms is dependent on the existence of others within ecosystems. It argues that non-vital human interference with or destruction of the natural world poses a threat therefore not only to humans but to all organisms constituting the natural order.
Deep ecology's core principle is the belief that the living environment as a whole should be respected and regarded as having certain basic moral and legal rights to live and flourish, independent of its instrumental benefits for human use. Deep ecology is often framed in terms of the idea of a much broader sociality; it recognises diverse communities of life on Earth that are composed not only through biotic factors but also, where applicable, through ethical relations, that is, the valuing of other beings as more than just resources.
Here it outlines the fundamental description of deep ecology, and that deep ecology looks past merely the rather passive 'preserving the environment as it is' approach into something more honest and meaningful. The separation of humans and other species is something artificial and induced, and that we need to break down these constructs through a deeper understanding of what we do. How our thoughts and actions impacts the interconnected ecology that we are actually part of.
It is described as "deep" because it is regarded as looking more deeply into the actual reality of humanity's relationship with the natural world arriving at philosophically more profound conclusions than those of mainstream environmentalism.[1] The movement does not subscribe to anthropocentric environmentalism (which is concerned with conservation of the environment only for exploitation by and for human purposes), since deep ecology is grounded in a different set of philosophical assumptions.
The term 'anthropocentric environmentalism' is key here, it directly says what the current popular form of looking after nature is - something that favours how humans experience nature over a democratic view of all the entities in nature. All the other organisms are there just to act as performers to provide humans with nature - they are commodities. Deep ecology dislodged this view of conventional environmentalism. This is similar to Timothy Morton's ecological theories around art and nature, and how artistic involvements can open up many alternate ways of seeing nature or understanding our relationships to the environment on a different level.
Deep ecology takes a holistic view of the world human beings live in and seeks to apply to life the understanding that the separate parts of the ecosystem (including humans) function as a whole. The philosophy addresses core principles of different environmental and green movements and advocates a system of environmental ethics advocating wilderness preservation, non-coercive policies encouraging human population decline, and simple living."
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