Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Trim, Alison
Master of Fine Arts - MFA
University of British Columbia
Still, they are speaking is an exhibition and accompanying written paper, that uses expanded drawing practices developed in and with post-fire landscapes of the Okanagan valley to explore the role of drawing in enabling somatic engagement with land and the non-human. My thesis evolved from an initial enquiry into how a move from Ireland to this new environment would impact my drawing practice. A methodology of regular walking on the outskirts of Kelowna, in the region of the 2003 Okanagan mountain fire, established a somatic relationship with specific place. Creative research taking place in the field led me to explore the different forms of knowledge we encounter through physical presence in the land, and to consider ways in which drawing can bridge the gap between human and non-human knowledges. The clear physical traces of the movement of fire through this land, particularly evident in the bark of trees, culminated in approaches to site-specific mark-making that actively engaged with surface, and led me to consider drawing as wake, a trace of past movement, a story left behind. Equating physical marks in land as forms of knowledge brought me to an exploration of written language as a mark making practice informed by the natural world, a theme that is explored by the writing of David Abrams and Tim Ingold. With wildfire an ongoing environmental issue within the Okanagan specifically and British Columbia as a whole, I have used my drawing practice as a tool to bring the physical marks of wildfire still written in the land into the cultural, conversational space of the gallery. In this exhibition drawing becomes a process through which human understanding can engage in productive communication with the physical language of the land. Through a combination of field and studio work initial drawing experiments developed into large-scale installations occupying a physical presence in the gallery that allows mark and surface to speak.
Still, they are speaking by Alison Trim B. A., Dublin Institute of Technology/Sherkin Island, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Visual Arts) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) May 2020 © Alison Trim, 2020 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: Still, they are speaking submitted by Alison Trim in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts . Briar Craig, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Co-Supervisor Denise Kenney, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Co-Supervisor Myron Campbell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Greg Garrard, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies University Examiner Additional Committee Members include: Dr. Lael Parrott, Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Still, they are speaking is an exhibition and accompanying written paper, that uses expanded drawing practices developed in and with post-fire landscapes of the Okanagan valley to explore the role of drawing in enabling somatic engagement with land and the non-human. My thesis evolved from an initial enquiry into how a move from Ireland to this new environment would impact my drawing practice. A methodology of regular walking on the outskirts of Kelowna, in the region of the 2003 Okanagan mountain fire, established a somatic relationship with specific place. Creative research taking place in the field led me to explore the different forms of knowledge we encounter through physical presence in the land, and to consider ways in which drawing can bridge the gap between human and non-human knowledges. The clear physical traces of the movement of fire through this land, particularly evident in the bark of trees, culminated in approaches to site-specific mark-making that actively engaged with surface, and led me to consider drawing as wake, a trace of past movement, a story left behind. Equating physical marks in land as forms of knowledge brought me to an exploration of written language as a mark making practice informed by the natural world, a theme that is explored by the writing of David Abrams and Tim Ingold. With wildfire an ongoing environmental issue within the Okanagan specifically and British Columbia as a whole, I have used my drawing practice as a tool to bring the physical marks of wildfire still written in the land into the cultural, conversational space of the gallery. In this exhibition drawing becomes a process through which human understanding can engage in productive communication with the physical language of the land. Through a combination of field and studio work initial drawing experiments developed into large-scale installations occupying a physical presence in the gallery that allows mark and surface to speak. iv Lay Summary Still, they are speaking is an exhibition of large-scale drawing installations made in response to areas of land impacted by the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Fire, on the edge of Kelowna, B.C. The drawings and accompanying written paper explore how mark-making practices are both natural and cultural forms of communication, and records of movement. Through a physical engagement with materials and surface, this thesis suggests that the making and viewing of drawings can be a bridge to enable a deeper understanding of the natural world. v Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................................... v List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... ix Dedication ..................................................................................................................................................... x Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Terrain ..................................................................................................... 1 1.1 A few words about words ................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Back-grounding ................................................................................................................................... 3 1.3 The terrain ........................................................................................................................................... 8 1.4 The place of drawing ......................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 2 Drawing as Language and Movement ........................................................................................ 16 2.1 Aestas Sacrum ................................................................................................................................... 16 2.1.1 Writing about writing ................................................................................................................. 18 2.1.2 Writing about drawing ............................................................................................................... 21 2.1.3 Drawing about writing ............................................................................................................... 23 2.2 Wake (Ghost Limbs) .......................................................................................................................... 26 2.2.1 A story of walking ....................................................................................................................... 29 2.2.2 Drawing the passing of time ...................................................................................................... 32 Chapter 3 Within Surface ............................................................................................................................ 34 3. 1 Interface (Pelt) .................................................................................................................................. 35 3.1.1 Different sides of the same coin ................................................................................................ 37 3.1.2 Eshu’s hat ................................................................................................................................... 40 vi 3.2 Inseparable (Pelt) .............................................................................................................................. 41 3.2.1 A question of framing ................................................................................................................ 43 3.2.2 The value of doing ...................................................................................................................... 44 3.2.3 Getting under your skin ............................................................................................................. 46 Chapter 4 Reflections .................................................................................................................................. 49 4. 1 Starting with Place ........................................................................................................................... 50 4.2 Boundary issues ................................................................................................................................ 53 4.3 Returning to drawing ........................................................................................................................ 54 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................................. 57 Appendices .................................................................................................................................................. 62 Appendix A Artist Statement .................................................................................................................. 62 Appendix B Facebook message from Toma McCullim to Alison Trim .................................................... 63 vii List of Figures Figure 1: It’s the sound of the pencil… ................................................................................................... 1 Figure 2: Still, they are speaking.............................................................................................................. 2 Figure 3: enveloped ................................................................................................................................... 3 Figure 4: Myra Bellevue Provincial Park ................................................................................................. 4 Figure 5: Crawford Canyon ....................................................................................................................... 4 Figure 6: As we move through life… ....................................................................................................... 5 Figure 7: Step by step ............................................................................................................................... 6 Figure 8: Swimming in Circles V, photocollage, Alison Trim, 2018 .................................................... 7 Figure 9: A Secret Garden She Hides, photocollage, Alison Trim and Emma Jervis, 2016 .......... 7 Figure 10: There are places….................................................................................................................. 9 Figure 11: Paper against tree, surface against surface ..................................................................... 11 Figure 12: Charcoal is brittle… ............................................................................................................... 12 Figure 13: Making drawings in Myra Bellevue Provincial Park ......................................................... 14 Figure 14: Aestas Sacrum, Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa Pine bark on rag paper, 36” x 180”, 2020 ............................................................................................................................................................ 15 Figure 15: Presence is non-negotiable ................................................................................................. 16 Figure 16: Getting down in amongst the marks ................................................................................... 18 Figure 17: Crawford Canyon .................................................................................................................. 19 Figure 18: The tree with which Aestas Sacrum was made ................................................................ 19 Figure 19 It's like trying to learn the lyrics ............................................................................................ 20 Figure 20: If I let the writing pass through my body ............................................................................ 21 Figure 21 Book of Ponderosa, 1:1, Okanagan Edition, Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa PIne Bark on rag paper, 36" x 60", 2020 ................................................................................................................. 22 Figure 22: An animal’s feet in snow ...................................................................................................... 23 Figure 23: Note III (Twombly) ................................................................................................................. 24 Figure 24: Blind Time XIII (Morris) ......................................................................................................... 24 Figure 25: Is this text or image? ............................................................................................................. 25 Figure 26: How close is too near? ......................................................................................................... 26 Figure 27: Wake (Ghost Limb), Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir bark on mulberry paper, with mixed media and rice paste, dimensions variable, 2020, FINA Gallery ..... 27 viii Figure 28: Wake (Ghost Limb), detail ................................................................................................... 27 Figure 29: These trunks are also pathways ......................................................................................... 28 Figure 30: Sometimes I just walk ........................................................................................................... 30 Figure 31: Over and over ........................................................................................................................ 30 Figure 32: A coyote, watching ................................................................................................................ 31 Figure 33: Racoon marks in the snow .................................................................................................. 31 Figure 34: Oak on Easel #1 (Knowles) ................................................................................................. 33 Figure 35 Woman Meditating After Corot (Fay) .................................................................................. 33 Figure 36: Neither here nor there .......................................................................................................... 35 Figure 37: The two trees with which Interface (Pelt) was made ....................................................... 36 Figure 38: gallery view of Interface (Pelt) ............................................................................................. 36 Figure 39: Deer and Coyote ................................................................................................................... 37 Figure 40: A line has its own thickness ................................................................................................. 38 Figure 41: Interface (Pelt), detail ........................................................................................................... 39 Figure 42 Interface (Pelt) from inside the gallery ................................................................................ 39 Figure 43: Hearing only one side of the story ...................................................................................... 40 Figure 44: Inseparable (Pelt), Alison Trim, hand-cut digital photographs on Enhanced Matte photopaper, hand-cut mixed media drawings, Ponderosa Pine needles, approx. 72”x 72”, 2020 .................................................................................................................................................................... 42 Figure 45: A single cut photograph from Inseparable (Pelt), documented before assembling the work ............................................................................................................................................................ 42 Figure 46: Cherrypicking ......................................................................................................................... 44 Figure 47: A ritualistic rebinding of land ................................................................................................ 45 Figure 48: Showing up ............................................................................................................................. 45 Figure 49: Bring the outside in... ............................................................................................................ 47 Figure 50; Inseparable (Pelt), detail ...................................................................................................... 48 Figure 51; Inseparable (Pelt), detail ...................................................................................................... 48 Figure 52 Gallery view, Still, they are speaking .................................................................................. 52 Figure 53 Gallery view, Still, they are speaking .................................................................................. 52 Figure 54 Book of Ponderosa, 1:2, Okanagan Edition, Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa PIne Bark on rag paper, 36" x 60", 2020 ................................................................................................................. 56 ix Acknowledgements I would like to extend my appreciation to the land and trees of the Okanagan valley. They have allowed me to work with and amongst them and have assisted in the production of the artwork for this exhibition. I would also like to acknowledge that this land in which I have been living and working is on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation, and that I am passing through this territory as an uninvited guest. The support of the Faculty of Creative and Critical studies, particularly in granting me two years of residency at Woodhaven Eco-Culture Centre, enabled my access by foot to those regions affected by the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Fire. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the importance of the support of my co-supervisors, Briar Craig and Denise Kenney, who have both been consistently encouraging and generous with their time throughout this process. x Dedication To Paul, for walking with me. 1 Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Terrain This paper is a story of an exhibition. A story of the making of marks, of walking, of drawing and of touch. A story of things that have passed by. As the written support paper to an exhibition of drawings, it will explore the relationship between these two processes of drawing and writing, each of which involves the body making marks on a surface to facilitate communication. Both exhibition and paper investigate how presence and physical contact with surface impact content and form in drawing and writing, and the nature of the conversations that emerge from that. Part of this investigation has resulted in the use of handwritten passages, presented as figures, inserted into the digitally typed text of this story. These are intended to be read as interludes, or asides, complementing the primary typed text. Figure 1: It’s the sound of the pencil… 1.1 A few words about words Words, like gallery walls, art institutions and cultural contexts are used here as framing devices for drawings that, in turn, are framing or translating somatic experience. As such, titles are important to my work. In later chapters I will use the title of each of the works in the exhibition as entry points to discuss aspects of their making and thinking. The title of the exhibition, Still, They Are Speaking, frames the entire conversation. It can be read as either an instruction (be still and listen) or a description (the speaking continues). It suggests that something (not us) is speaking and will continue to speak whether we choose to 2 listen or not. That something could be the drawings themselves within the gallery walls or it could be the land from which those drawings are derived. By introducing us to the notion that marks derived from land can be a language, communicating forms of knowledge that exist independently of whether we, as humans, understand them, the title sets the scene for ideas reiterated throughout the work and explored further in this paper. The word Still in particular, draws our attention to both time and space, to the present and to presence. It places us in the present moment, as it refers to both the past (continuation) and the future (anticipation). It urges us to take notice of the here and now. Figure 2: Still, they are speaking The primary reference for this work is the land in which it took place, but important references from within human cultural frameworks also need to be acknowledged. Coming from a British/Irish background I brought many of those influences with me. I base much of the theory behind this work on the thinking of contemporary British environmental/ecological philosophers and anthropologists including Timothy Morton, David A. Kidner and, particularly, Tim Ingold who introduced me to lines that weave a complex relationship between embodied creative practice and environment. The work of Irish artist Brian Fay enabled an understanding of drawing as process, and its relationship to time, whilst the British tradition of artists who walk, particularly Hamish Fulton and Tim Knowles, have given me the confidence to consider time out walking as a key part of my studio practice. 3 This has been supplemented by my recent immersion in the environmental, creative and critical discussions taking place in British Columbia and the wider North American cultural context which includes both indigenous and colonial stories of and relationships with land. I have complemented my somatic experience of this place with a cultural engagement with writing about place that comes from a variety of sources including trail enthusiast Robert Moor, indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, eco feminist Donna Haraway, and cultural ecologist David Abrams among others. Finally, Lucy Lippard’s writings on land art and locality, Giuliano Bruno’s fascinating survey of surface, and David Rosand’s study of drawing are some of the critical voices from the art world that have proved relevant. All these words, interesting and varied as they are, are framing devices. Like the walls of the gallery, they are used to build a structure designed to hold a moment. Figure 3: enveloped 1.2 Back-grounding My work begins with place. Being in place. This is a description particularly suited to some of the environments found in the interior of British Columbia. One may describe oneself as being out on the bog, or on the prairie, but one is very definitely in the forest or in the mountains. They surround you. 4 Figure 4: Myra Bellevue Provincial Park Figure 5: Crawford Canyon 5 Building a relationship with land and place involves spending time in that place, being present. For me that often means walking, a practice described by walking artist Hamish Fulton as “one of mankind’s most basic dialogues with nature” (Auping 6). I like the pace that walking affords. It is conducive to looking, listening and haptic perception and provides the opportunity to absorb what one is moving through. It establishes contact with the surface of the ground at every step. It does not involve spending money and is not dependent on anyone else, making it accessible, immediate and non-commercial. Establishing a somatic relationship with the land in which I find myself, allows me to inhabit that place and build a relationship with it. I use the word inhabit here in the sense that Tim Ingold describes when he says; “The inhabitant is one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life contributes to its weave and texture” (Being Alive 83). Ingold’s writing around line, land and making, and the emphasis he places on an involvement with the world, have been informing my practice since before arriving in British Columbia from rural Ireland. I arrived here with an interest in discovering how a change of landscape would impact my art practice. I had no doubt that it would. Figure 6: As we move through life… Before leaving Ireland, I had developed a habit of morning swims throughout the year in a local lake (see fig.6). Literal immersion in the landscape in this way did a lot to reinforce a belief in the primacy of physical, somatic experience as a form of knowledge that comes before and is then processed by, intellect and language. Ireland traditionally, has strong and complex links to land 6 as a source of identity and belonging, as do indigenous peoples here in North America. This is not something I can lay claim to. Having grown up in a small dormitory town (bedroom community) in the UK, and then having moved to Ireland, I have never lived in a place where I am considered local or indigenous. Throughout my adult life however, I have always chosen to live in close connection to land. On land I did not own, in land I did not come from. Always an outsider, a blow-in, to borrow an Irish phrase. If relationship with land is restricted to those who can claim indigeneity to that land however, it would leave vast amounts of people impoverished. This impoverishment is being encouraged by the urbanisation and mobilisation of populations through industrialisation, capitalism and globalisation, and it is a tide against which this thesis resists. Figure 7: Step by step “Restoring land without restoring relationships is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as re-establishing proper hydrology or clearing up contaminants” (Kimmerer 338). This quote, from a professor of Environmental and Forest Biology who is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, places the relationship of humans to land as an equal priority to the many more concrete and practical changes needed to improve the environmental situation. Theoretical ideas developed in urban situations without connection to place could prove to be unsustainable without an embedded, somatic understanding of land and locality. There are many ways to restore relationship to land, but I would argue that the most effective involve direct somatic engagement with the nonhuman. 7 Figure 8: Swimming in Circles V, photocollage, Alison Trim, 2018 Figure 9: A Secret Garden She Hides, photocollage, Alison Trim and Emma Jervis, 2016 8 1.3 The terrain I prefer the word terrain, rather than environment or landscape. Terrain comes from two Latin terms terra and terrene. Terra means earth and terrene means of the earth or of the world. So, terrain is something tangible and physical, secular rather than spiritual. A secondary meaning of terrain, other than referring to a piece of land, refers to a field of knowledge or interest, a specific milieu (“Terrain n.3a.”). This definition allows me to consider terrain as a specific set of knowledges physically located within land. Arriving in this place, this terrain, with some previous experience of both Calgary and the interior mountains of BC, it was immediately obvious that the Okanagan valley offered a different experience to both. My residency at Woodhaven eco-culture centre, part of a wildlife corridor of adjoining parklands in the Mission area of Kelowna, specified the location of the terrain I came to work with even further. My thesis exhibition is a response to those regions of hillside located beyond the urban development on this edge of the city, those areas reachable within walking distance from my door. Back in 2003, the Okanagan Mountain fire moved through this terrain and the marks of fire are still clearly written across the land. My walks traverse the edges of Myra Bellevue Provincial Park, across Crawford Canyon, Cedar Mountain and the Lebanon Creek Greenway, and into Okanagan Mountain Park (see fig. 4, 5 and 17). In these areas the city of Kelowna sprawls right up to the edge of parks land as local communities like Crawford Estates, Upper Mission and Kettle Valley, have rebuilt and spread in regions where 17 years ago 239 homes were destroyed by fire (Geography Open Textbook Collective). Wildfire is a part of life in this province, but also a sign of change as fires become more severe “influenced by more pronounced droughts due to climate change and excessive fuels as the result of fire suppression, widespread forest health problems, and forest management practices” (Daniels, Wildfires and Resilience 1). 9 The marks left by fire are testaments to the power of natural forces, the persistence of life, and the cyclical nature of ecosystems. Walking this terrain, I find it both bleak and beautiful, a place of loss and a place of continuance, showing traces of time, past fires and other stories, visible in the bare folds of the land and the bark of the trees. In attempting, as a visual artist, to translate these stories, I focus on what I see, visual traces, and use expanded drawing practices to give voice to place. Although, to apply a quote more often used in reference to humans than the non human “There’s really no such thing as the voiceless, only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard” (Roy). Has the land been deliberately silenced? Or do we just prefer not to hear? Figure 10: There are places… We relate to land through our physical presence within it, and through cultural mediation deriving from the experience of that presence. David Kidner suggests that “what we might call the “ecological tendency” of systems ensures that thought processes and physical surroundings [… ] tend towards consistency with each other” (223). It follows that the more we exist primarily within human built environments the more self-referential our culture becomes in a positive feedback loop that moves us ever further from meaningful relationship with the non-human. As artists, or just as human beings, the stories, images, objects and other actions we create in response to land, amplify those experiences. This work could not have taken place anywhere else. It is place specific, rather than site specific to reverse Lucy Lippard’s description of land art (82). Kidner asserts that in a less capitalist and more ecological society “Resonance with the 10 natural world will be considered a more profound value than internal consistency; for internal consistency, if attained at the price of fidelity to the phenomena we are open to, is a paranoid stance that merely disguises the inaccuracy of our standpoint” (223). Both Lippard and Kidner are speaking to the importance of paying attention to locality and its diversity before it is lost. Through being physically present here and now, I open myself up to the influence of this terrain and what it has to say. Being influenced means I am part of something, I am entangled. I am not a scientific, objective observer, I am a creative inhabitant engaged in situated making (Haraway 4). 1.4 The place of drawing I do not see this work as primarily an environmental or ecological statement but as an exploration of drawing. Drawing has always been an integral part of my practice. It is one of the most basic and fundamental of cultural expressions, stretching back through thousands of years of making marks in or on a surface as a process of communication. Moving a mark-making material across a surface is a physical act that engages me entirely in place, time and moment. It is a point of contact with materials, and with the other, a form of connection. Drawing as activity allows me into conversation with the world, to participate, to be involved. With this thesis I propose that both the making, and viewing, of drawings can renegotiate our relationship to knowledge to include somatic experiential forms of knowledge alongside the intellectual forms we recognise as purely human; and that the haptic, tactile process of drawing can bring us closer to the non-human, re-establishing ourselves as part of, not separate to, the natural world. The physical actions of place-specific drawing involving collaboration between human and non-human processes can access non-human knowledges present in the land. When it comes to viewing, the simple physical presence of non-human mark-making that resonates with our own bodies within the cultural space of the gallery can broaden our somatic understanding of place and shared cultural forms to include different forms of knowing. 11 Figure 11: Paper against tree, surface against surface 12 The claims I make for drawing, as a form of presence and an avenue for conversation with the non-human, are relevant to many current issues connected to land use and climate change. In particular, they are pertinent to wildfire regions where the movement of a physical fire event through the land as surface, has left its mark. The combination of fragility and resilience evident in the richness of surface found in this post-fire terrain has led me to work with forms of drawing that are tactile and generative. Through the simple act of pressing my sketchbook against a burnt tree and moving it across that surface, the presence of charcoal, a familiar drawing material, right there in the bark of that living tree, allowed a direct engagement between the cultural space of my sketchbook, and the past experience of the tree (see fig.11). Walking through areas of this terrain there are dead standing burnt trunks of Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine, but also surviving trees where the bark is still heavily burned and contains charcoal as part of the living tree. By moving paper against this charcoal rich bark and through the application of pressure between the artists hands and the bark of the tree, traces of the charcoal embedded in the surface of the tree are transferred to the surface of the paper. Figure 12: Charcoal is brittle… One surface moving across another, a physical point of contact and a movement recording and communicating that engagement. The interaction between participants, the tree bark, the paper and my hand, records the trace of another past interaction between fire and tree, the fire moving 13 through the land, leaving traces of its own, that I will come to call a wake. The action of drawing also anticipates the future interaction to take place in the gallery. This is drawing at a fundamental level. Drawing with these burnt trees, through a meeting of surfaces, and a process of touch, is at the core of my working process throughout this exhibition, and the resulting marks are present in all the works (see fig 13). Walking the land searching for suitable trees, carrying large rolls of paper out into the land by foot, handling that paper physically against the tree, considering weather conditions that impact the work, exploring the mark-making potential without taking too much control of the process, all of these things insist on presence in and with place. Understanding the importance of this physical process in the development of my relationship with this terrain has led much of the subsequent thinking and practice that has resulted in the work in this exhibition. When considering whether work created with an involvement of the non-human can truly be called collaboration, Donna Haraway asks an important question that I’d like to briefly address; “Who renders whom capable of what and at what price?” (23). Whilst the initiative for these drawings comes from me it could not have been achieved without these trees, and the marks created with different trees are each unique. The agency of the tree may not be in the action of creating the drawing, but the tree’s agency has already occurred (is occurring) in the formation and growth of its bark through and with the charcoal left by fire damage. It has already made (is making) its own marks and choices. It is also important to acknowledge that the drawing process does not damage the tree in any way. I prefer to describe the process as a conversation, rather than collaboration, between artist and tree, taking place on the surface of the paper, with each contributing to the outcome. Indigenous scientist Robyn Wall Kimmerer recognises the importance of this conversation with land; “Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change, you just need to learn how to ask” (158). Drawing can be one of those questions. 14 The experiences of making drawings in the land is only the beginning of this story. The presence of the drawings in a gallery context, and the experience of viewing will be discussed in more detail in the concluding chapter of this paper. The intervening chapters will use the four drawing-based installations included in the exhibition and the titles I have framed them with, as tangible starting points for tracing the lines of thought that entangle the work. Aestas Sacrum and Wake (Ghost Limbs) are discussed in Chapter 2, suggesting that wildfire can be both a necessary sacrifice and a form of non-human mark-making. This chapter explores the relationships between drawing, writing, language and meaning, as forms of collaborative trail building, leaving authorship open ended. Chapter 3 describes the porous boundaries of Interface (Pelt), and the complexity of connections in Inseparable (Pelt) focusing on surface as a living skin. . Figure 13: Making drawings in Myra Bellevue Provincial Park 15 Figure 14: Aestas Sacrum, Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa Pine bark on rag paper, 36” x 180”, 2020 16 Chapter 2 Drawing as Language and Movement The word draw, when considered etymologically, alludes consistently to movement; to draw up, to draw in, to draw across, to draw close, to draw breath. These are all actions that engage us with the world. Drawing as an action, is in the moment, drawing as an object is the mark left behind, and as a mark or sign, it is a form of language. But the world we engage with is not a blank page, and there are already marks present, a language already exists. To draw into conversation with the world, to take part, we must first, be present ourselves, and second, learn to listen to what is already there. Figure 15: Presence is non-negotiable 2.1 Aestas Sacrum Aestas Sacrum is a Latin phrase meaning sacred summer, or summer sacrifice. Latin is immediately evocative of the origins of European and colonial civilisations, sacred traditions of Catholicism and the scientific naming and classification of the living world, all of which arose from those cultures Timothy Morton would describe as Mesopotamian agrilogistics (Dark Ecology, 9). The title is an adaptation of Ver Sacrum (sacred spring), a phrase adopted for use by the Vienna secessionists to represent new beginnings as modern art broke away from traditions in Austria at the end of the 19th century. Ver Sacrum was originally a sacrificial tradition within Italic tribes during times of distress, the exile of a generation of children ensured survival when a tribe could no longer sustain a growing population, forcing migration and expansion. The phrase links art, history, land and cyclical change in a story that has many 17 echoes and correspondences within the contemporary. Issues related to colonisation and overpopulation are at the heart of many of our environmental and humanitarian crises. We have run out of room to just move on to new pastures, and the lack of inclination to sacrifice, to restrict growth, to appease the situation, prevents us from restoring balance (Hickel). In adapting this original phrase to Aestas Sacrum I am linking these ideas to the summer cycle of wildfires. Wildfire is now understood as an intrinsic part of a forest’s ability to regulate and maintain itself. Fire adapted ecosystems rely on the ‘summer sacrifice’ of some growth and understory to ensure continuity. Modern fire suppression policies along with changes in climate have disrupted that balance, resulting in more severe fires. This “fire suppression paradox” (Daniels, “How Wildfires”) is partly a result of our societal inability to deal with loss and our intolerance of sacrifice and forces beyond our control blinding us to the needs of the forest to burn. Aestas Sacrum, (see fig.14) along with pages from the Book of Ponderosa, Okanagan Edition, (see fig 21 and 54) contains the simplest use of the process of mark-making with burnt trees described earlier, although the scale of the piece made it, logistically, the most challenging. In allowing the marks to stand alone they become a direct record of my interaction with that tree. Aestas Sacrum takes the form of a large scroll with marks inscribed across the paper horizontally, as if lines of handwriting. It has the appearance of an historical document, telling the story of this tree, and of what the tree remembers of the day the fire came through back in 2003 (see fig.18). Hung from the top of the wall in the gallery, falling the full length and curling onto the floor, the fifteen-foot roll of heavy rag paper starts to echo the scale of these trees within the limited gallery space. These illegible marks are an outcome of, rather than an illustration of, a physical experience. The physicality of handling a large piece of paper against the bark of a tree in a place accessible only on foot is visible in the marks left on the paper. Like 18 an ancient text that we cannot necessarily decipher, but enjoy exploring, the surface of the paper becomes, like land, map or terrain, a place to move through and engage our senses without the need to codify what we see. Figure 16: Getting down in amongst the marks “Recall that, for readers of medieval times, the text was like a world one inhabits, and the surface of the page like a country in which one finds one’s way about, following the letters and words as the traveller follows footsteps or waymarkers in the terrain” (Ingold, Lines 26). Similarly, the Book of Ponderosa, Okanagan Edition, references the outsized pages of a book in its dimensions. Echoing the Bible in its methods of citation of chapter and verse, these are extracts of a wider story, told from multiple viewpoints. In this iteration I am quoting from the Ponderosa, but other trees tell other stories of fire, and editions vary across the province and the wider world. For example, recent entries in the Book of Eucalyptus, Australia Edition have yet to be transcribed. 2.1.1 Writing about writing Written language is seen as specific to human civilisations. Mark-making is the more widespread practice found at the root of written languages abstracted from their origins. As Gary Snyder points out, languages were not invented but are “naturally evolved wild systems” (127). That evolution began in land. 19 Figure 17: Crawford Canyon Figure 18: The tree with which Aestas Sacrum was made 20 Based on the work of Merleau-Ponty, David Abrams identifies spoken language as a bodily expression, or gesture, that originally developed through a participatory form of sensory perception that links language physically to our sensory relationship to the world around us (89-90). Abrams’ description of participatory perception reflects how I feel about the process of drawing as a physical interaction with that which is not me, a reciprocal act of engagement (57). “Through the act of drawing the draughtsman reaches out, puts himself in active touch with the world” (Rosand, “Time Lines” 211). The relationship of many early forms of writing to drawing is clear. These symbols, including pictographs or hieroglyphs, were usually derived from animals or elements of the landscape. Chinese tradition in particular attributes a strong correlation between writing and nature, and in an old Sumerian story a certain type of bird, whose tracks resembled cuneiform script, were seen as scribes to a language that humans couldn’t read (Kurlansky 23). Figure 19 It's like trying to learn the lyrics The Hebrew and Greek cultures, more of Morton’s Mesopotamians (Dark Ecology 9), developed alphabets, which used symbols of writing that relate only to the sounds of human speech, creating entirely self-referential writing systems and detaching language from its origins in land (Abrams 93 – 102). While the alphabet’s relationship to the body remained in its link to speech and sound, Ingold identifies a further separation between language and the body, that occurred with the transition from handwritten to typed, or printed text (Lines 28-29). Both these writers are speaking about stages of the abstraction of knowledge from its original physicality, a detaching of mind and body, culture and nature, self and other. 21 Figure 20: If I let the writing pass through my body 2.1.2 Writing about drawing In the book Vitamin D, drawing is defined as “an indication in any medium or format of the presence of the human - from airplane vapor trails to Richard Long's walks through a field” (Dexter 6-7). This broad definition allows us to call traces of movement within land drawings, but specifies only those made by humans. To broaden this further and include the movement of the non-human within land as a form of drawing we must turn to a catalogue essay for the Stage of Drawing exhibition for support: “an undecidability of the relation between mark and signifier would open up the possibility of a continuity between the human and the non-human, the human and the animal, even the human and the inorganic”, leaving us open to the suggestion that the land draws, even writes and that any mark could be described as writing or language “even if we do not have the means to decode it” (Newman 100). “The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm” (Abrams 95). This multiplicity of marks in the rich surface of the land are records of past movements or gestures. 22 Figure 21 Book of Ponderosa, 1:1, Okanagan Edition, Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa PIne Bark on rag paper, 36" x 60", 2020 23 Figure 22: An animal’s feet in snow In Aestas Sacrum, the marks record the movement of paper across tree, and in turn, the charcoal present in that tree is a record of the movement of fire across this terrain. If all these movements and marks can be considered as drawing, or as forms of language, then the work converts drawing present in the land into another form of drawing in the gallery. 2.1.3 Drawing about writing Rosand describes the drawn line as “both self referential and representational maintaining its own identity even as it alludes to something beyond itself” (Drawing Acts 2). Drawing then has a foot in both camps, it is both gesture and sign, mark and text. As our relationship with writing becomes more abstract and less somatic, perhaps drawing can be a bridge, reconnecting us to the mark-making process, for “of all the arts, drawing has the potential to reduce to its smallest the gap between meaning and non-meaning” (Newman 100). So, what does drawing have to say about writing? To help answer this I looked to some other artists’ work that explore the boundaries between writing and drawing. Cy Twombly’s ‘language paintings’ (see fig. 23), featuring often illegible scrawled marks resembling handwriting reveal “the incarnate place of the origins of language” that I have been describing (Kaushik 245). The bodily gesture or performative act of language takes precedence here so; 24 Figure 23: Note III (Twombly) Figure 24: Blind Time XIII (Morris) 25 “that language is opened up and it means something tactile, something available to touch” (Kaushik 243). The illegibility of marks in Twombly’s paintings removes the need to decipher meaning and allows the viewer to focus on the mark itself rather than what it signifies. The artist stated that each line was “the actual experience of making a line” not an illustration of that experience, or a signifier of something else but “the sensation of its own realization” (Rosand, “Time Lines” 205). This description could also apply to the marks in Aestas Sacrum, and the other work in this exhibition, they convey the actual experience of their making, out there in the bush, up against the tree, the sensation of their realization. Robert Morris’s Blind Time drawings (see fig. 24) also describe the process of their own making, but through handwritten instructions, included on the same paper on which those actions are then performed blindfolded. Combining written language and the physicality of drawing in both form and concept in a series of drawings produced over thirty-six years, the marks, made with the hands are tactile, messy and bodily, where the written instructions are conceptual and specific. It has been suggested that Morris’s drawings reverse the progression from physical mark-making to written language and return the written instructions to their phenomenological form; “Blind Time turns text into trace, unravels writing into drawing” (Meltzer 79). Conversely you could say that with this work perhaps I am re-entangling the drawn mark, the trace, back into a form of writing that retains its reciprocity with land. Figure 25: Is this text or image? The work that most closely echoes what I have attempted with Aestas Sacrum comes from Tim Knowles (see fig. 34). His series of Tree Drawings used drawing implements attached to 26 branches that, when moved by the wind, made marks on a carefully placed surface. The presentation of these drawings alongside photographs of the means of their production, suggests that the tree is drawing or writing. Where Knowles work engages with the gesture of the tree’s tips through the movement of wind, my own work engages with the tree’s surface, and the movement of the passage of time. 2.2 Wake (Ghost Limbs) A dictionary definition of wake: to rouse from inactivity, to become conscious; to hold a vigil – to remain watchful; the track of waves in water, the path of anything that has passed (“Wake”). I have come to use this as a term to describe drawing that goes beyond what is meant by a trace. The act of drawing rouses one from inactivity and makes us aware; we look, we watch, we hold vigil. The act of drawing is a movement and the resulting drawing, as object, is its wake, the path of that moment of awareness and gesture, that has now passed. The temporal nature of drawing and the importance of presence are both inherent in the word, along with suggestions of physical disruption familiar to anyone who has tried to hold a canoe steady while a motorboat speeds past. An awareness of the impacts of our actions is an ecological awareness around which we must all remain watchful. Figure 26: How close is too near? Phantom limb syndrome is the condition of feeling sensation in a limb that is no longer there, often due to amputation. Gone, but not forgotten. In the artwork Wake (Ghost Limbs) they are 27 Figure 27: Wake (Ghost Limb), Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fir bark on mulberry paper, with mixed media and rice paste, dimensions variable, 2020, FINA Gallery Figure 28: Wake (Ghost Limb), detail 28 the limbs and trunks of trees, rather than those of the human body. The summer cycle of loss and sacrifice replicated again and again in wildfire regions is not fatal (to the forest as a whole) but necessary to ensure continuity of life. Burnt vegetation feeds the site, heat triggers the germination of seeds and the land regenerates as a new iteration of forest. Sometimes we must be prepared to lose things in order to carry on. Wake (Ghost Limbs) is an installation of marks on mulberry paper, applied directly to the wall, dependent on its surroundings (see fig. 27 and 28). Beginning with the marks made with burnt trees, the paper is torn to resemble the trees themselves, in strips that traverse the full height of the gallery wall. More marks are added, sourced from drawings and photographs of those trees, that bark, the terrain. Cut marks are glued on in layers behind and in front, cut from rubbings, or etchings, or drawn anew in response to what is already there. Over and over the trail of marks is reiterated. Not complete even when applied to the gallery wall with rice paste, still more marks are added, reinforcing the pathways, that nevertheless remain ephemeral. Figure 29: These trunks are also pathways When the exhibition finishes the paper is dampened to loosen the paste, the drawing is peeled away, and the wall washed down. Wake (Ghost Limb) is temporary, although some aspects of it should survive its removal from the wall to become part of a future reincarnation of the piece, part of a new conversation, another story. 29 “I am interested in the fragility of the moment of engagement—in heightening that moment. To see a work, knowing that it will not last, emphasizes that moment of its existence” (“Richard Wright”) The repetitive complexity of Wake (Ghost Limbs) is an oral history to the written history of Aestas Sacrum. Repetition as an aid to memory is well known, and the repetition of stories, passed down through generations, serves as a living trail, with each telling, or passing layer of footprints adding to the accumulated knowledge. Where Aestas Sacrum suggests a history marked down as definitive document, Wake (Ghost Limbs) gives us multiple, impermanent and changing layers of storied line, renewed with every telling. Scars left on the land and the bark of trees - the marks we see, the appearance - are its stories of destruction and renewal. “The form of a thing, it’s appearance is the past. My face is a map of everything that happened to my face. A beehive is a story about what happened when some bees chewed some wax” (Morton, Humankind 71). Through time and movement appearance becomes story, becomes language. 2.2.1 A story of walking Walking, like the act of drawing, is a movement that leaves a wake, a practice of mark-making. The honourable intentions of “leave no trace” are unrealisable, as studies of trail erosion in recreational ecology show (Leung and Marion 130 - 136). Trail is a very North American word. In Ireland we follow a path or track, but never a trail. And we walk, where the North American hikes. Trail is a word I am willing to adopt, I like its sense of exploration, and suggestion of impermanence. It exists through reiteration. I will continue to walk trails however, rather than hike them. It is a more democratic description that does not differentiate between specialist activity and the everyday. Drawing and walking are both physical activities that engage somatic understanding alongside intellectual understanding, prehension alongside comprehension. “Walking is itself a form of 30 circumambulatory knowing. [….] This intelligence, however, is not located exclusively in the head but is distributed throughout the entire field of relations comprised by the presence of the human being in the inhabited world” (Ingold, Being Alive, 46-47). If walking is a form of knowing, then trails are the (temporary) record of that knowing inscribed in the land (Moor 199). Figure 30: Sometimes I just walk We are certainly not alone in contributing mark making to this archive of communal knowledge present in the drawn land. Our marks intermingle with those of the non-human and time also participates, as marks change, fade, or grow (see fig. 35). “The only binary that ultimately matters to a trail is the one between use and disuse – the continual, communal process of making sense, and the slow entropic process by which it is unmade” (Moor 23). The walk itself is also collaborative. The walker does not have complete control over the encounter, each walk is unique (admin_TW). Each walk out to find burnt trees, carrying rolls of paper, was a different experience, in the heat, or after snow, one day a coyote was there watching, another time a stranger stopped to talk, and each time the marks are similar, but different, a record of a specific time and place (see fig. 32). Figure 31: Over and over 31 Figure 32: A coyote, watching Figure 33: Racoon marks in the snow 32 A continuing reiteration of movement and mark-making resulting in collaborative, temporary and unique journeys is a perfect description of the making of Wake (Ghost Limbs). This approach, akin to the creation of a trail, is a conversation between surface and line. The line responding to what it finds on its walk, as it moves through and engages with, surface. David Rosand’s description of line as “an active participant in the act of drawing, in the processes of its own creative independence.” reinforces the idea of the line’s agency, suggesting that “whatever it may owe to the impulse of the drawing hand, it insists on a dialectic with its producer” (210). This “continual communal process of making sense” involves tree, charcoal, paper, artist, weather, coyote, and more, resulting in surface recording the passing of time (Moor 23). 2.2.2 Drawing the passing of time Drawing as a balance between creation and entropy is beautifully demonstrated in the practice of Irish artist Brian Fay (see fig. 35). Fay uses drawing as a research tool to explore the practice of conservators of old paintings, making visible the signifiers of time as he traces the cracks and stages of degradation and subsequent restoration. Through his drawings the paintings become a living surface or landscape within which marks of time evolve, are erased, and inevitably evolve again. “If you move away from the illusionistic the painting becomes a visible palimpsest of actions taken” (“Brian Fay and Mark Johnson” 00:26:46-50) This description, when applied to terrain, relates to Lucy Lippard’s phrase “land-use”, reminding us that the marks in land are a visible palimpsest of our actions, alongside those of other active agents (Lippard). The visible signifiers of time I trace in this work are remnants of a specific fire event in the land’s recent history. The marks of fire will remain visible in the rings of the tree, a historical record for years to come. As with a painting, land is surface, rich in layers, lines and histories that fold in upon themselves. Drawing is a time-based practice, that can move through these surfaces and stories, letting us keep watch in its wake. 33 Figure 34: Oak on Easel #1 (Knowles) Figure 35 Woman Meditating After Corot (Fay) 34 Chapter 3 Within Surface In describing the history of writing and its transition from handwritten manuscript to mechanically printed text Ingold recognises the importance of the accompanying fundamental changes in our perception of surface. “The ways in which they [written words] were understood depended critically on whether the plain surface was compared to a landscape to be travelled, or a space to be colonized, to the skin of the body or the mirror of the mind” (Ingold, Lines 40). In making a connection between written language and mark-making in the previous chapter, this chapter will focus on consideration of the surfaces upon/within which those marks occur. Surface is defined as the exterior or upper boundary of an object or body (“Surface n.1”) but rather than be thought of as a division, this boundary can be seen as the point at which interaction and communication take place between that object or body and its environment. The surface is where it all happens, “an active site of exchange between subject and object… a mobile place of dwelling, a transitional space that activates cultural transits. It is a plane that makes possible forms of connectivity, relatedness and exchange” (Bruno 8). Every living thing, every object, has its boundaries, its surface, the point at which it ceases to be itself and becomes something other. These boundaries have thickness, a thickness that recalls Donna Haraway’s description of a “thick present” (1) and Morton’s fuzzy boundaries (Dark Ecology, 90). This boundary layer, this medium of communication, this liminal space between, is living surface – be it skin or bark, or even soil or atmosphere. These are the dynamic surfaces where we live and play, where we engage with that which is not us. Our skin sheds dead cells, hosts yeasts and bacteria, exudes sweat, and absorbs hand cream. It is not a hard and fast border; it is porous and semi-permeable. It grows, changes and ages. It is a living surface, a place of relatedness and exchange. Bark, as skin, is a continually renewing surface. It can split and crack with growth and shed its outer layers. It protects living tissue 35 below, discourages pests, and provides a home for many other plants, animals, fungi or lichen, an active site, not just a barrier. Figure 36: Neither here nor there In my drawing practice, paper becomes that active site of exchange. Skin, bark and paper equate to one another in this work as coverings, boundaries, meeting places and as records of time passing, of actions and of movements. The boundary or point of contact is neither the point of the pencil nor the surface of the paper, but the place where they meet, a thick and porous layer, a medium, within which communication occurs. 3. 1 Interface (Pelt) A wildland-urban interface (WUI) zone is the name given to an area where uncultivated land meets human habitation. When wildfire reaches a WUI zone it is referred to as an interface fire, as occurred with the Okanagan mountain fire in 2003 (Geography Open Textbook Collective). This is the point at which wildfire becomes a serious danger to human life, community and property. The word “interface” in this context, suggests a boundary, but a boundary that is moving and changing as urban development continues to sprawl further out, or as a fire-front moves through. It is evocative of surface as a meeting point between two states, where an interaction occurs. The interface zone, like a skin, must both protect the city from, and interact with, the land that surrounds it. It is the first line of defence, the most vulnerable, but also a point of access. Conversely, as well as being the edge of the city it is also the edge of the land, a place where the wild land is most vulnerable to the impact of urban encroachment. An access 36 Figure 37: The two trees with which Interface (Pelt) was made Figure 38: gallery view of Interface (Pelt) 37 point for humans who want to head out into the parks on the trails, it is equally an access point for animals who continue to try and follow the creek on down to lakeshore, or search for food in our garbage bins and gardens. Figure 39: Deer and Coyote This idea of the interface as an interactive boundary appears in this work in the form of a pelt. The bark of the tree is equated to the pelt or hide of an animal. Pelt is a term used to describe the skin of an animal, especially when removed or separated from the body (“Pelt, Entry 2 n.1”). It is skin out of context, without life, that has become an object, a trophy, or a protective covering in the form of clothing, shelter, or furnishings. 3.1.1 Different sides of the same coin Five sheets of paper 8ft high by 28” wide, have each been worked on both sides. On one side are charcoal marks collected by dragging the paper down the surface of a fire-scarred Ponderosa Pine found on the banks of Bellevue creek (see fig. 37). This is one of the nearest trees to Woodhaven, where I live, that is still visibly impacted by the fire as it travelled down through Crawford canyon. It is situated on a sliver of parkland extending along the side of the creek and into the suburbs. The vertical scratches travel up the paper, not reaching all the way to the top. On the other side is drawing in the form of a texture rubbing, taken by holding the paper against the bark of another tree, and rubbing across the surface with compressed charcoal, bought in a 38 store downtown. This tree, another Ponderosa, stands on the opposite side of Bellevue creek, in the grounds of Woodhaven, and was not damaged by fire (see fig. 37). The familiar patterns of the ponderosa bark, collected by the texture rubbing, are worked into back in the studio to create a bark-like surface. These marks descend from the top of the paper, not reaching all the way to the ground. Figure 40: A line has its own thickness Working both sides of the paper, each side involving a process of applying the paper to a tree, and using as unstable a material as charcoal, inevitably results in a heavily worked surface. Additional, unintentional marks and the marks left by processes of erasure, result in surfaces that are worn and weathered, lived in surfaces. This is a physical process that engages with the terrain of the land and the terrain of the paper in a bodily sense and on a bodily scale. These sheets (or skins?) of paper were then mounted into five wooden frames, hinged together to form a freestanding structure or folding screen. The wooden frames are covered in a rice paper, like a layer of skin, lightly wrinkled, still allowing the grain of the wood to be glimpsed through its translucent surface (see fig.38 and 41). Interface (Pelt) is the first piece a viewer will see on approaching the gallery. Lit from behind, the translucence of the paper is illuminated allowing the marks on both sides to be visible at the same time. The fainter marks, collected from the burnt tree, are on the side facing us, the side in shadow. The stronger texture rubbings are on the far side of the paper but show through as shadow or as a deeper layer. We become more aware of the paper as a three-dimensional object as the two sets of marks meet and overlap throughout the length of the screen. They 39 Figure 41: Interface (Pelt), detail Figure 42 Interface (Pelt) from inside the gallery 40 combine and yet remain separated creating a subtle awareness of the thickness and substance of the paper that sits between them. When the viewer moves into the gallery and around to the far side of the screen, only the black bark pattern rubbing is visible. The subtleties and depth have gone leaving the drawing appearing strong and stark in the bright light of the gallery spotlights (see fig.42). Figure 43: Hearing only one side of the story As a folding screen it is a temporary barrier, a permeable and fragile boundary through which light passes. The folding screen suggests concealment, but a concealment that is partial and surmountable, not permanent and exclusionary. We can easily walk around to view it from the other side. 3.1.2 Eshu’s hat In the collaborative tactile processes that created these drawings the depth of the paper becomes a thick and porous boundary through which haptic communication between artist and tree is recorded on the paper as meeting point or interface. One process, controlled more by the intervention of the artists hand, is visually stronger and clearer, its pattern more communicable. The second, more directly engaging with the tree and its story, is subtler and less easily understood. As one object that shows us two versions of an experience, two points of view, Interface (Pelt) references the story of Eshu’s hat. Eshu is an African trickster God who makes two friends argue over who is right and who is wrong when he passes between them wearing a hat that is 41 black on one side and white on the other. Both friends are right of course, but as Lewis Hyde asks, when recounting this story, what colour is it on the inside? “What colour is the boundary between the black and the white? How wide is the boundary? What if Eshu, like some modern mathematical topologist, took to stretching his hat, then squeezing it, then folding it – stretching, squeezing, folding, stretching squeezing, folding – a hundred or a thousand times? How then to trace the divide between black and white? Sometimes a simple boundary becomes unimaginably complex” (251). Interface (Pelt) like Eshu’s hat, has two sides, but does not tell the whole story. 3.2 Inseparable (Pelt) Inseparable refers to things that are so closely connected they cannot be considered separately. This term could be used to describe the marks on either side of the paper in Interface (Pelt), but with Inseparable (Pelt) we are not describing the relative simplicity of two sides, but the complexity of multiple parts (see fig.44). Inseparable is the opposite of isolation. Things that are inseparable cannot be isolated, cropped, mounted in a frame, removed from context, named, categorized, put in a box, cordoned off or otherwise separated from itself. Inseparable describes the relationship between things, where surfaces meet and touch and intermingle. Inseparable is ecological, as ecology is concerned with the nature of relationships between living things and their environment. Inseparable is what self and other, nature and culture, us and them actually are. Complex, messy, entangled, unstable. Inseparable (Pelt) is made up of individual photographs, only loosely woven together, quite easy to separate (see fig.45). The piece includes two dozen photographs, as well as a handful of drawn elements (see fig. 50 and 51). Taken from the surfaces and lines of the post-fire Okanagan landscape. The images include rock faces, forest floor, drawings, shadows, lichen, 42 Figure 44: Inseparable (Pelt), Alison Trim, hand-cut digital photographs on Enhanced Matte photopaper, hand-cut mixed media drawings, Ponderosa Pine needles, approx. 72”x 72”, 2020 Figure 45: A single cut photograph from Inseparable (Pelt), documented before assembling the work 43 branches, footprints in snow, cracks in the ice, wildflowers, burnt trunks and more. What these images share is a preponderance of lines and a richness of surface, the folds, loops and repetitions of which suggest geology, movement and growth. Cut into with a scalpel they have been disassembled as intact images and instead become objects, the cut breaking (at least partially) the photographic illusion. These are placed overlapping on the floor of the gallery and interwoven with each other and with ponderosa pine needles to create a type of rug (a pelt?) on the floor that creeps in from the corner of the gallery, like a tiger skin hunting trophy, or a living skin, still growing and moving. 3.2.1 A question of framing As the only piece in this exhibition based on the practice of photography rather than drawing, Inseparable (Pelt) brings into the conversation the history of that medium. Those histories most relevant here are the apparent ability of the photograph to capture light, movement or time, and the camera’s linguistic relationship to the gun, another tool with which to shoot. In comparison to a drawing, which is always tactile, and passes through the body, photography is kept at a distance, translated through a piece of equipment and isolated by a framing device. When Kidner speaks about how “potentially subversive aspects of experience are rendered harmless by their location within a frame that detaches them from the “real” business of life” he is referring to the allocation of wilderness to designated parklands (130). This description could also easily apply to the photograph, the frame detaching the subject from “real” life. As Lippard states; “When even the most critical photographs are exhibited, they become art objects” (170) and Braun adds in the aspect of mobility when he says that they “provide a means for the ‘forest to be translated into a two dimensional form (an inscription) that can be moved to new sites without modification” (Braun 76). 44 Figure 46: Cherrypicking In rendering a thing as separable and removing it from its context, the photograph can be described as a pelt, the image as a skin, removed from the body of its reality, to become object. These photograph/pelts, then, have been cut and then woven together in a patchwork, reassembled into a new kind of whole. The cut acts as circumscription, a form of drawn line that becomes contour, an imagined boundary or outline that has no equivalent in nature only in its two-dimensional translation (Rosand, Drawing Acts 26). This is line playing at being surface, a cut line that separates image from not-image. 3.2.2 The value of doing The physical process of cutting these photographs is a repetitive activity in which I immerse myself, in which I can find “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 00:13:57). It requires my full concentration and is time-consuming and laborious, but it must be done in the moment. As with walking a trail, I have some idea of the overall direction at the outset, but must watch carefully, making small decisions, and placing each step as I go. This is what makes the process worthwhile. As I decide on each cut I engage with the photograph as object and come to know the surface of this printed image. This is wayfaring, not navigation (Ingold, Lines 26). I do not decide on an overall strategy and then programme a computer to complete the task, I am actively involved in physically negotiating my way through these surfaces. 45 Figure 47: A ritualistic rebinding of land The function of labour as a physical manifestation of meaning must also be addressed here. Labour requires presence. It is a commitment of both time and body. It is also a recognition of limits. I cannot make whatever I like, but I can make that which I am able to with the time, energy and resources available to me. The recognition of limitations is an important part of an ecological understanding. The desire to achieve, or to have, as much as possible without putting in that labour, or acknowledging those limitations, is a capitalist/consumerist understanding that is maintained only by hiding the exploitation of labour and resources somewhere else. Somewhere not present. Figure 48: Showing up The combination of time consuming, often physically demanding work with an output that is intentionally temporary and non-durable is an approach that does not sit well within a capitalist worldview that expects either cheap, invisible labour and throwaway products, or expensively handcrafted symbols of wealth for display or exchange value. 46 3.2.3 Getting under your skin An important aspect of this work is its location, on the (static, neutral, grey) gallery floor, it comes to represent that particularly rich and varied surface; the ground. The layers of imagery appear to rise up or subside beneath the floor and each other. The ground is something we tend to rely on as being stable, yet as with skin and bark, it is undergoing constant cycles of regeneration, growth and movement, from the micro level of soil decomposition to the macro level of tectonic plates. “Inside the earth, heat seeks to randomize motion; outside the pressure of gravity restrains it…. so what we know as the surface is really only a waystation – a point of equilibrium – between opposing forces” (Logan 95). It is that on which we rely, and that which we discount. While we value land as property, we do not value the dirt that makes up that land, as highly as we should. Dirt is a stage of renewal, as is fire. The story of the Japanese trickster God (again as told by Lewis Hyde) is my favourite description of this process in which “dirt gets into the house of the sun, fruitfully reversing the year-end impulse to enclosure, order and purity,” and he goes on to explain: “You get no seeds at all if the sunlight is too pure ever to mingle with the muck of the rice paddies. You get no seeds if shit never enters the new palace” (Hyde 179). As with dirt, an asset we choose to ignore at our peril, the visibility, or not, of labour is important in understanding how we attribute value. Many of the photographs included in Inseparable (Pelt) are only partly visible. The hours spent cutting, lots of small, individual decisions made, and many of them cannot be seen. This does not mean that they were not important. Individual pieces, if separated from the whole, could be beautiful standalone works, but this work is a community of images. This is how things are in an ecological worldview, each beautiful thing 47 cannot be separated from the rest, isolated, placed in a frame, enclosed, ordered and pure. They cannot be separated from dirt, decay and death, from the ground, and the land. Figure 49: Bring the outside in... Inseparable (Pelt) requires us to be aware of our bodies as we look down into it. Over the past two years I have been gradually overcoming a fear of bridges that provoked a strong feeling of vertigo (head spinning, churning stomach, weak legs) when on a bridge, or even worse, looking down through gaps in the surface beneath my feet. Some of this feeling comes through in the work. A sense of falling through, of instability. It suggests that we stand, not on an inert surface but a living planet. It also references the feelings of vertigo and anxiety that can be induced by an awareness of the precariousness of our environmental situation, the ground on which we may no longer be able to rely. “We spend our time hurrying away from the real as though it were deadly to us “it must be up there on the horizon” we think. And all the time it’s in the soil, right beneath our feet” (Logan 97). 48 Figure 50; Inseparable (Pelt), detail Figure 51; Inseparable (Pelt), detail 49 Chapter 4 Reflections “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place” (Bragg). This paper is a story of an exhibition. A story of the making of marks, of walking, of drawing and of touch. It is also a story that is being written as it unfolds, like a cutting edge leaving a trail in its wake. This chapter, unlike those preceding it, is being written in a world changed by the impacts of the spread of coronavirus. The exhibition, Still, they are speaking, was installed just as the UBC Okanagan campus announced transitions to online classes, and social distancing began in earnest in B.C. It was de-installed less than a week later, before campus buildings closed entirely, making it even more temporary and fleeting than anticipated when writing about Wake (Ghost Limb) in Chapter 2. It is impossible for me to write this concluding chapter without reflecting on the circumstances under which the exhibition took place, and the relevance of some of the themes it explored to the present situation we find ourselves in. I will use this conclusion to reassess the findings of this thesis from this new context, and to reflect on the experience of the physical exhibition, and its otherwise virtual afterlife. I will end with a discussion of drawing in the light of this experience, and an anticipation of where it could lead. As with Inseparable (Pelt), or perhaps any ecosystem, an exhibition is more than the sum of its parts. The individual artworks of Still, they are speaking, can each stand alone and be considered individually, as they have been in Chapters 2 and 3, or they can be discussed as a whole, as a form of conclusion. This is essentially what an exhibition is – a conclusion of a particular period of research and making. My discussion of the exhibition as a whole was to be about how it functioned as a public space in which we are physically present with the work. For many that was not possible, and so for many it will be seen only in digital documentation. An exhibition celebrating the value of presence and touch has coincided with a time when we have been forced to become wary of 50 touch, physical presence, proximity to others. An exhibition encouraging active engagement with the non-human has been closed early by a virus originating amongst a too intimate engagement with the non-human in the wildlife markets of China. Despite these contradictions I believe that the core of this thesis is more important than ever. 4. 1 Starting with Place Reading back over the previous chapters a number of things struck me with their resonance. Chapter 1 spoke of restoring relationship to land through presence. The importance of our understanding of locality has become more pressing now that movement around the globe is severely restricted. Whilst we currently depend on technology to continue many key functions through virtual contact rather than physical presence, we are simultaneously being forced to confront our relationship with our immediate surroundings. Shelter in place, the evocative term that the US is using to describe the need for self-isolation, describes this well. To find shelter in place we must look to the here, and the now, and to what we have within reach to fulfil our needs. We must be present and learn to listen, as the title of this exhibition suggests; be still. Any gallery space is also a distinct place, with its own character and story. The FINA gallery comes with a ceiling space full of industrial shapes and grey insulation, and walls and floor that carry the traces of countless student exhibitions installed and removed on a seemingly endless cycle. Inhabiting this place involved both quietening these remains, and working with what was offered. I had a fairly clear idea of how the exhibition was going to be installed beforehand, but some questions were only resolved once installation was in progress. The final form for the lines of Wake (Ghost Limb) and the placing of Interface (Pelt) were two of these decisions. The fuzzy shapes in the ceiling space, created unexpectedly effective horizontal echoes to the fuzzy lines of Wake (Ghost Limb). The depth created by the wall drawing, along with the placing of Interface (Pelt), and the breathing space provided by leaving plenty of white wall created a feeling of enclosure and quiet within the gallery (see fig. 52 and 53). 51 You could almost say it was like being sheltered in place. This experience of being with, and amongst the work, as being with and amongst the trees out in the terrain the exhibition references, is one that cannot be substituted for virtually. My arguments for drawing as a physical practice, and reasons for using photographs as objects, are precisely because I believe actual engagement with material provides a more effective translation of experience than technology can capture. For physical exhibitions to function people must travel to public places to witness them, something not currently possible. Virtual exhibitions, while not without value, are not equivalent when it comes to the somatic experiential forms of knowledge I have been describing throughout this paper. Giuliana Bruno’s writing about surface effectively describes the importance of haptic relation to artwork, emphasising presence without rejecting either technology or modernity. Haptic for Bruno “refers to more than just touch, for it comprises the complexity of how we come into contact with things” (194). Haptic artworks “require relational engagements from mobile viewers and empathy with spatial forms” (Bruno 195). This mobile journey through and within the space of an exhibition is also a walk, and involves the same circumambulatory knowing referred to in chapter 2 (Ingold, Being Alive 46-47). In this way the importance of walking and presence comes full circle from initial methodology to culminating experience. Moving back and forth to take in the whole, or the detail of, Wake (Ghost Limb), experiencing both sides of Interface (Pelt) and looking down into Inseparable (Pelt) are all encouraging an awareness of our bodily relationship to objects and environments. This relationship with the world is still present when we sit alone at our computer screen, but it is experienced differently as if in two places at once, or on both sides of Interface (Pelt) at the 52 Figure 52 Gallery view, Still, they are speaking Figure 53 Gallery view, Still, they are speaking 53 same time. An artist friend of mine describes the plurality of this virtual experience in a piece of writing (Appendix B) that she shared with me in response to images of the exhibition online. “There is acute knowing in the remembered embodied kinesthetic of your practice. When I see your work through the screen […] I am toggling between the imagined real and the flashes of your finger on the blade, cutting away at a map in the studio we shared […] I see your eyes look in places I have not seen […] I stick this into my seeing of your virtual exhibition. And this is its world. The world of now, where I type out of my hospital bed in the deep night” (McCullim). This description is a collage encompassing multiple places and times; the gallery in Kelowna, our studio in Skibbereen, the landscape of the Okanagan, and a hospital ward in Ireland. This is still a somatic experience of time and place, but the sensory elements of the artwork are only triggers, supplemented by the abstract understandings and contextual memories of the writer. The current situation begs the question of how our additional dependence on virtual technologies for communication might abstract us even further from the somatic knowledges associated with physical presence as we wait out this pandemic. And in the meantime, the virus spreads, not unlike wildfire. 4.2 Boundary issues The story of Ver Sacrum outlined in Chapter 2, is a story from a society that understood the dangers of overcrowding, and acted to prevent tragedy. The stories written by wildfire in the bark of these trees tells another story of sacrifice, while the constantly updated statistics of confirmed cases and deaths on our internet feeds seems to complete the trilogy. This is the cumulative entropy of trail building. No matter where we go, or what we do something must be sacrificed, something left behind; footprints and erosion. If the coronavirus has shown us anything it is that we are inescapably entangled with the rest of the world, both human and non-human. We cannot fully control the borders and boundaries that protect our internal bodies from viral invaders. Our porous surfaces have become a liability, our 54 fear of dirt, and of outsiders has been fully realised and indulged as we continually wash our hands, and shut ourselves away. The modern myth of transcending one’s material conditions that Timothy Morton speaks of is echoed by commentators on the current crisis writing from an ecological standpoint (Dark Ecology 9-10). Instead of seeing nature itself as a threat, they blame the overcrowding and strain on wild ecosystems caused by humans, for the increase in zoonotic diseases, like Covid-19 (Vidal). “Living behind screens, passing between capsules – our houses, cars, offices and shopping malls – we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: insulation from natural hazards. Now the membrane has ruptured, and we find ourselves naked and outraged, as the biology we appeared to have banished storms through our lives” (Monbiot). 4.3 Returning to drawing Like a virus or a wildfire Inseparable (Pelt) also wants to grow and continue its spread, but for now, it has been separated and packed away, and Wake (Ghost Limb) patiently awaits a new surface to inhabit. As the chaos of recent changes begin to settle into a new and quieter world, for now at least, I continue to ask what role drawing can play. The quote with which I began this chapter is from a song by an English singer-songwriter that tells the story of a woman who listens to the music of The Four Tops as she struggles to survive an abusive marriage, suggesting the importance of the arts in general in seeing us through difficult times (Bragg). Storytelling is a powerful medium, whether spoken, sung, written or typed; a medium that by its nature encourages retelling, reiteration and reinterpretation. The etymological root of the word medium “refers to a condition of betweenness and a quality of becoming as a connective, pervasive or enveloping substance. As an intertwining matter through which impressions are conveyed to the senses, a medium is a living environment of 55 expression, transmission and storage” (Bruno 5). Like a surface, a medium is that which comes between one thing and another, enabling communication. This thesis has equated the medium of drawing, as a form of intertwining matter and surface, to the living environment of expression inherent in language and storytelling, without the need for words. Storytelling, song and drawing are, each in their own way, immediate and temporal media, and they lend themselves well to moments of individual experience and limited resources. I have defined drawing as the physical yet temporary remains of lived stories inscribed through a combination of movement and touch, and told by both human and non-human authors. Drawing then, when considered as a tactile process, rather than a mimetic tool, is a practice that can help us deal with uncertainty through physical contact with the real. In Humankind Morton speaks of the “Severing”, a fissure between reality and the real; “an event that does not take place ‘at’ a certain ‘point’ in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, in whose wake we are caught” (23). In this thesis I have described drawing as a wake, its lines and stories spreading outwards and catching us in its ripples. But rather than a fissure or a cut, could we instead see it as a needle and thread to stitch reality and the real together again? To draw up, to draw in, to draw across, to draw close, to draw breath, to draw together, to draw into conversation. This document, as the exhibition itself, is both a drawing, and a story of drawing. It questions what drawing can be, and asks where stories are told and how. “The story of the realisation of a project can be told time after time […] there can be no certainty as to what actually took place – ultimately the protagonists are either dead or alive, beyond that one can only assume or presume, tell more stories, make more installations” (Groys 40). These drawings will tell more stories, and make more installations. There may not be any certainty, and I don’t have any answers, but drawing is an effective question. 56 Figure 54 Book of Ponderosa, 1:2, Okanagan Edition, Alison Trim, burnt Ponderosa Pine Bark on rag paper, 36" x 60", 2020 57 Works Cited Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More than Human World. 2017 edition, Vintage Books, 2017. admin_TW. “Hamish Fulton Talking Walking.” Talking Walking, 17 May 2008, www.talkingwalking.net/hamish-fulton-talking-walking/. Accessed 27 February 2019. Auping, Michael. “A Nomad Among Builders.” Places, vol.3, no. 4, Fall 1987, pp.4-7. Bragg, Billy. “Levi Stubbs Tears.” Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, Go! Discs, 1986. Braun, Bruce. The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on Canada’s West Coast. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. “Brian Fay and Mark Johnson in Conversation.” Youtube, Paper Studio, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqhwhYROcs4&feature=youtu.be. Accessed 12 December 2019. Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media. Paperback, University of Chicago Press, 2016. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “Flow, the Secret to Happiness.” Ted Talks, 2004 www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness. Accessed 1 February 2020. Daniels, Lori. “How Wildfires Can Do More Good Than Harm.” UBC Faculty of Forestry, 30 July 2013, https://forestry.ubc.ca/2013/07/how-wildfires-can-do-more-good-than-harm/. Accessed 24 February 2019. ---. Wildfires and Resilience. 26 September 2017, bccfa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Lori-Daniels-2017-Wildfires-and-Resilience.pdf. Accessed 29 November 2019. Dexter, Emma. Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. Phaidon, 2005. 58 Fay, Brian. Woman Meditating After Corot. Artnet, 2006, http://www.artnet.com/artists/brian-fay/woman-meditating-after-corot-cracks-95C9uejlmDXBPVbUHwtYBQ2. Accessed 29 Feburary 2020. Geography Open Textbook Collective, “Case Study 3: 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park Fire” British Columbia in a Global Context, BC Campus Open Education, opentext.bc.ca/geography/chapter/case-study-3/. Accessed 29 November 2019 Groys, Boris. Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment. Translated by Fiona Elliott, Cloth edition, Afterall Books, 2006. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Hickel, Jason. “Forget ‘developing’ Poor Countries, It’s Time to ‘de-Develop’ Rich Countries.” The Guardian, 23 September 2015, www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/sep/23/developing-poor-countries-de-develop-rich-countries-sdgs. Accessed 28 December 2019. Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World. Canons Edition, Canongate Books, 2017. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge, 2011. ---. Lines. Routledge, 2007. Kaushik, Rajiv. “Cy Twombly: Gesture, Space and Writing.” Moving Imagination: Explorations of Gesture and Inner Movement, edited by Helena de Preester, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013, pp. 235–46. Kidner, David W. Nature and Psyche. State University of New York Press, 2001. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass; Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. First paperback edition, Milkweed Editions, 2013. 59 Knowles, Tim. Oak on Easel #1; Stonethwaite Beck, Smithymire Island, Borrowdale, Cumbria 1/07/2005. 2005, www.timknowles.co.uk/Work/TreeDrawings/OakonEasel1/tabid/286/Default.aspx. Accessed 27 February 2020. Kurlansky, Mark. Paper; Paging through History. WW Norton and Co. Inc. New York, 2016. Leung, Yu-Fai, and Jeffrey L. Marion. “Trail Degradation as Influenced by Environmental Factors: A State of the Knowledge Review.” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, Mar. 1996, pp. 130–36. Lippard, Lucy R. Undermining; A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West. The New Press, 2013. Logan, William Bryant. Dirt; The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Riverhead Books, Berkley Publishing Group, 1996. McCullim, Toma. Message to Alison Trim. Facebook Messenger, 23 March 2020 Meltzer, Eve. “How to Keep Markmaking Alive: Robert Morris in Blind Time.” Pro Forma: Language/Text/Visual Art, edited by Jessica Wyman, vol. 1, YYZ books, 2005, pp. 70–88. Monbiot, George. “Covid-19 Is Nature’s Wake-up Call to Complacent Civilisation.” The Guardian, 25 March 2020, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/25/covid-19-is-natures-wake-up-call-to-complacent-civilisation. Accessed 26 March 2020. Moor, Robert. On Trails. Simon and Schuster, 2016. Morris, Robert. Blind Time XIII. Moma, www.moma.org/collection/works/36080. Accessed 27 February 2020 Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology. Columbia University Press, 2016. 60 ---. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. Ebook, Verso, 2017. Newman, Michael. “The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.” The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, edited by Catherine de Zegher, Tate Publishing and the Drawing Centre, New York, 2003, pp. 93–108. “Pelt, Entry 2 n.1”, Collins English Dictionary, Harper Collins, www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/pelt. “Richard Wright, Park & 75, New York, March 5–May 10, 2019.” Gagosian, 18 February 2019, https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2019/richard-wright/. Accessed 13 October 2019. Rosand, David. Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ---. “Time Lines; The Temporal Dimension of Marking.” Moving Imagination: Explorations of Gesture and Inner Movement, edited by Helena de Preester, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013, pp. 205–20. Roy, Arundhati, The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture. “Arundhati Roy: The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture.” Realvoice, 8 Nov.2004, realvoice.blogspot.com/2004/11/arundhati-roy-2004-sydney-peace-prize. Accessed 23 February 2020. Snyder, Gary. “Language Goes Two Ways.” The Green Studies Reader, edited by Laurence Coupe, Routledge, 2000, pp. 127–31. “Surface, n. 1.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam Webster 2020, www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/surface. Accessed 1 February 2020. “Terrain, n. 3a.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam Webster 2019 www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terrain. Accessed 29 November 2019. 61 Twombly, Cy. Note III. Gagosian, July 2005, gagosian.com/artists/cy-twombly/. Accessed 27 February 2020 Vidal, John. “Tip of the Iceberg: Is Our Destruction of Nature Responsible for Covid-19?” The Guardian, 18 March 2020, www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/tip-of-the-iceberg-is-our-destruction-of-nature-responsible-for-covid-19-aoe. Accessed 26 March 2020 “Wake, Entry 1, n. 2 and 3 and v.9, Entry 2 n. 2.” Collins English Dictionary, Harper Collins, 2019, www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/wake. Accessed 22 March 2019. 62 Appendices Appendix A Artist Statement Still, they are speaking is an exhibition of expanded drawing practice developed in and with post-fire landscapes of the Okanagan valley. In 2003 the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire spread across more than 250 square kilometres and consumed 239 homes on the edge of Kelowna. In land still scarred by that fire, blackened trunks dominate the skyline with a now-familiar stubble, while up close thriving ecosystems regenerate and continue despite encroaching urbanisation. Walking these hillsides, the stark beauty, richness of surface and visible traces of loss and regeneration found there, fascinate me. The thick fire-resistant bark of the Ponderosa Pine in particular, carries the marks of that past fire as charcoal that has become part of the living tree’s story, written in its skin. These marks speak of complexity and fragility, of sacrifice, resilience and renewal. They are a written language, present in the land, describing forms of knowledge that exist independently of us. Acknowledging this is an exercise in humility that requires us to imagine beyond the human. My drawing practice demands a haptic engagement with materials and a physical immersion in place. Through touch and presence, I renegotiate my relationship to knowledge as an experiential form of understanding, beyond the bounds of language, and closer to that of the non-human. In making the drawings for this exhibition a collaborative contact of surfaces transfers charcoal marks from tree to paper, to become a record of conversations that have taken place between fire and land, footstep and ground, body and tree. This experience of drawing as an act of engagement with place, is translated into new physical encounters with drawing as object, installed within the gallery. Time and labour have been invested in repetitive and cyclical processes to develop complex, active surface. The use of paper, an inherently fragile medium, grounds the work in the temporality and physicality of the here and now. These 63 drawings can be read, as maps, or experienced, as terrain, but they insist on presence. I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to the land and trees of this small part of the Okanagan valley, on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation. It has been a privilege getting to know this place, working amongst this land and responding to its stories. Alison Trim, March 2020 Appendix B Facebook message from Toma McCullim to Alison Trim There is acute knowing in the remembered embodied kinesthetic of your practice. When I see your work through the screen, at this place, at this time I am toggling between the imagined real and the flashes of your finger on the blade, cutting away at a map in the studio we shared. This seems like a great metaphor for what’s happening in the cut away absence. As an undergraduate I wrote a thesis on ‘absence as presence in African Art’. I was reflecting on how the imagination is spaced in the invisible where the frame is the map to a journey we can be taken on. It is the unseen that is potent in its potential. It is the space of curious speculation. A drawing is as much the marks unmade, the reduction to the small choices of being. I see your eyes look in places I have not seen, I know when you are feeling snow through this virtual life. I stick this into my seeing of your virtual exhibition. And this is its world. The world of now where I type out of my hospital bed in the deep night. I’m just out of isolation, testing negative for Corona today but my severe asthma attack had me fighting for breath. Something you know too as you breath in, in that wild beauty, and breath out in manifestation. We carry on creating. Toma McCullim, March 2020
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Still, they are speaking
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