The Gardan Journal Issue 04

THEGARDAN 04

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THE

CRAIGARDAN JOURNAL

SEEDING SPRING

Dear Reader, Let’s celebrate spring together. We are all pandemic-weary, isolationspent, and ready to sow the seeds of a new season.

Issue 04 acknowledges the work we all continue to do and how through this work we shape — and are shaped by — the world around us.

And, when we are too tired to carry on, we can plant a seed for later. We can store the energy of a thousand blossoms in one tiny seed and plant it in the ground for another day.

Spring is the moment for trusting in small actions, giving hope to future days, bringing new life into being, and making preparations for the work ahead.

— All of Us at Craigardan April 2021

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MISSION

THE GARDAN

Craigardan is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a mission to encourage the human imagination to interpret the world with philosophical, ecological, and artistic perspective.

The Gardan, a project of Craigardan, is an offering to our community in response to the 2020-21 coronavirus pandemic, with the intention to carry us forward and onward long after.

Together we will be stronger and more imaginative than ever before.

T o f u l fi l l o u r m i s s i o n , Craigardan supports artists, chefs, craftspeople, farmers, scholars, and writers through residencies, social justice initiatives, and other community programs.

PROGRAMS AND PLACE Located in the heart of the Adirondacks, Craigardan’s artist-in-residence program strives to cultivate a rich and collaborative place-based experience for all people working in all disciplines.

The Gardan is intended to foster conversations about creativity and its processes among and across all d i s c i p l i n e s . We w e l c o m e contributions from artists and thinkers, activists and farmers, environmentalists and chefs at any and all stages of creative development.

We hope that The Gardan will unite you with your extended family of creative thinkers and bring a breath of Adirondack air to your inbox.

Each issue can be found online at www.craigardan.org CONTENT SUBMISSION We invite your contributions of words, images, video, field notes, sound, and any other way you wish to connect to us, and to each other.

Issues are curated by our editors. Complete guidelines for content submission are online at www.craigardan.org/ journalsubmission

Each issue is inspired by and draws from the weekly happenings during a residency session, delivering a small piece of our program — along with inspiration and ongoing support — to encourage you to self residency wherever you are.

The Gardan is guided by our staff and fully supported by Craigardan’s funding and the efforts of our board and volunteers. We are actively pursuing grants and donations that would enable us to offer compensation for contributors.

All contributors receive a complimentary print copy of The Gardan by mail.

Lanse Stover, President

Allison Eddy

Michele Drozd

David Speert, Vice-President

Loren Michael Mortimer

Janelle A. Schwartz

Lorene Garrett, Treasurer

Kate Moses

Catherine Haskins, Secretary

Andrea Volpe

Mary Barringer

Frances Westley

Our strong interdisciplinary foundation encourages creative thinking and collective problem solving by welcoming diversity in all of its forms.

BOARD AND STAFF

CONTACT

EDITORS

CRAIGARDAN www.craigardan.org info@craigardan.org 518.242.6535 9216 NYS Route 9N, Elizabethtown, NY 12932

With special thanks to editors Mary Barringer and Kate Moses.

All artwork is used with permission of the artist, who retains copyright of their work

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CONTRIBUTORS

DAN KEEGAN Westport, NY

BLAKE LAVIA + TZINTZUN AGUILAR-IZZO talking-wings.com

DAVID SPEERT Kittery Point, ME

FELIX HASKINS Westport, NY

STELLAH DE VILLE New York, NY

JANELLE A. SCHWARTZ Keene, NY

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TARAMARIE PERRI Brooklyn, NY

DENNIS DELAY Richmond, VT

ELENA BORSTEIN Elizabethtown, NY

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IN RESIDENCE MONDAYNIGHTDINNER Kate Moses in conversation with painter Elena Borstein

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WEDNESDAYCRIT Dennis Delay shares works from the ongoing exploration of his immigrant ancestry

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THURSDAYCHECKIN Reemergence with TaraMarie Perri

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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES Spoken Earth Dances by the Talking Wings Collective

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SATURDAYFARMSHARE Janelle A. Schwartz reflects on tadpoles and books

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SUNDAYPOSTCARDPROJECT Felix Haskins sends an example of improvisation on the cello

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COVER FRONT: DAN KEEGAN “What is and What Will Always Be.” Keegan’s ongoing Shadow Series that start out as photos of fleeting shadows cast on forest paths. The drawings end up as abstractions that are at times referencing nature and other times weightless. The concept behind the shadow series is that we are here and now grounded on this earth but also adrift in an unknowable, infinitely vast universe. Graphite on paper, 42” H X 30” W BACK: WE BEGIN TO LEARN

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MONDAYNIGHTDINNER

ELENA BORSTEIN Writer Kate Moses in Conversation with painter Elena Borstein 6

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Elena in her studio

Craigardan’s Kate Moses visited artist Elena Borstein in her Adirondack studio at the start of the pandemic.

me up here. We spent a summer at this dome in Port Henry which was magical. I just love the Adirondacks and then I got into sailing as well. In fact, I have a whole series of paintings about sails.

Elena Borstein: I feel like I've been in quarantine for half my life.

KM: You have some of them in the house.

Kate Moses, The Gardan: No kidding.

Actually, let’s start there. It’s an interesting thing - sheltering at home when you're an artist.

EB: Yes, a lot of my earlier works are in the house. I think I just started this work after I got up here. I was probably still making paintings from Greece then. I was traveling, which I loved. I loved photographing the places I've traveled. I've always been interested in architecture. Ever since graduate school where I got really inspired by Louis Kahn.

EB: It’s not that different than normal except that I would work all day in my studio and then go out with friends three or four times a week. And when you don't have that option, it's very different. That changes everything. I was working a lot and feeling really great about it and then my exhaust system broke. I have to get it fixed now. And in the Adirondacks those kinds of things take time.

KM: Oh my gosh, you had him as a teacher!

EB: I used to audit and sit in on his classes at Penn. I loved the way he talked about how spaces affected the human psyche. He was very poetic about how people would react to various kinds of spaces, light, and so on. I thought that was a moving analogy for everything. Combining that with my love of traveling, I looked at places where I liked the houses. People would try to interpret that in different ways. I think in some way it was my attempt to become a really independent person in the second wave of feminism in the 70s. I wanted to be on my own so I used to take my backpack and push off by myself and travel to different places. I love the Mediterranean countries of Spain, France, and Italy. Greece was my absolute favorite and I started traveling around the different islands in Greece. I would get on a ferry wherever it went and get off.

KM: So that brings up the whole question of being an artist in a rural location. And especially when the work that you're doing requires equipment that you either have to get from far away or you have to get a custom system.

EB: Right, I'm not a plein air artist.

KM: Could you tell us a little bit about how you came to settle in the Adirondacks?

EB: Both my husband and I were from New York City. When we got together, I was 50 and he was about 10 years older. His work was as a set designer so he would work for two or three weeks straight, many hours a day. I was a professor. I would work a couple days a week and our schedules were really out of sync. So when we met up we decided to retire. I had been teaching for years so I was ready. He was getting ready too. He wanted to move up here because he was a sailor and sailed on Lake Champlain. I used to live in the Catskills on weekends and he said to me, “the Catskills are like Central Park.” So he invited

KM: Did you have a favorite?

EB: Santorini before it got really touristy. I have millions of paintings from Santorini.

Patmos is a beautiful one for people...no cars.

I've gone maybe 40 times. Every summer I would go to Greece. I was very lucky to be a professor and have the whole summer. I 8

photographed five or six hours a day in the morning and in the evening. In the winter I'd work on paintings in my studio. I couldn't work there onsite so I would have to bring them back. I’d cull through the thousands of images and find the good photographs. It’s all in the editing, right? I think I went until about 2004 and then I started trying to go to some different places. I went to Cuba a few times and took pictures there and other places intermittently. Then I stopped taking my own pictures. I certainly got influenced by The Pictures Generation. They are a group of artists who started to say, especially when phones came into being and everybody was taking pictures, there are enough pictures in the world. Why don't we repurpose some of the pictures that we already have?

some earlier work that I had done. I did a lot of courtyards. I like that kind of inside-outside space you can have in tropical places. It can be cool and shady or it can be sunny with that light into the house like a kind of interplay between inside and outside. I have always been fascinated by Mexican architecture and this architect in particular because I loved his colors. That will be recognizable to anybody who sees my painting. These are from the internet, a little image at very low resolution, and then I feel like I'm reactivating them.

KM: Exactly.

EB: There’s a lot of that “to-ing and fro-ing.”

This one is a couple of different images; this is from the time we are all in, and so many horrible things are happening. One of the reasons I've never done straight political art is because my paintings take so damn long to do! By the time I'm done some new horrible thing is happening. This was my reaction to Trump detaining migrants on the border. It's probably still going on and worse. It's just not in the news anymore. The idea of detaining children, separating families...I was so horrified by it. I felt like now we've come to a point where I can't just be doing beautiful peaceful paintings. But that's what I want to do. This is my contradiction that I'm living through right now. We're living through an atmosphere of COVID and the claustrophobia we feel. Yet we still want beauty in our lives. So these are really of contradictory meaning and conflicting meaning. Sometimes people get confused when you try to say more than one thing at a time.

KM: Oh, wow. I don't even know about this movement.

EB: It’s called “appropriation” by artists using something that's already in the world. It could be from a computer. There are a lot of issues that have been hammered out around copyright which I think are still a bit controversial. These are mostly images that have been appropriated from the computer, low resolution images, that I recombine on my computer and call “mash-ups.” I’ll take several images or different views of one place and recombine it and give it a new life.

KM: Does the work have different meaning for you since these are not places you've been?

EB: This is interesting. These are all images from the architect Luis Barragan. I've never seen any of his buildings and never been to one of his houses, I’ve only seen pictures. But I've been seeing pictures of his houses since the 70s. I always loved the colors in his work and the light. I traveled to Mexico and some of my earliest paintings were from Mexico in the 70s. So, in a way, it was coming back to 9

I think that's what I'm trying to do with these.

When you're an artist, people want to know what they mean. And artists don't always know. I once was doing some paintings in the Bronx. Somebody had challenged me, “Why do you always go to Greece?” I said, “Oh, we have such beautiful sunsets there. I love the light. I love the colors of the houses and the

light of water.” And they said, “Well, we have sunsets in the Bronx.” I took that as a challenge. I took photographs in the Bronx for three or four years in the middle and late 80s.

I did a whole series in the Bronx. And they were beautiful! Of course, I did them all at sunset. You have sunlight hitting a bodega just at that golden hour and everything's glowing and shining.

something that's closer to life. That contradiction and dilemma that you're feeling, I think a lot of artists are feeling right now.

What is your relationship with beauty and wanting to create it or render it when so much ugliness is happening that you can't help but be affected by?

EB: It’s a great explanation. I’ve always had that feeling of stepping back from beauty, and even in my early work there was always a little bit of darkness or loneliness.

KM: This reminds me of this idea in writing, which I got from a colleague and teacher, Michelle Carter, and from teachers of hers, that sentimentality is unearned emotion.

It’s that you have manipulated an audience or reader to feel an emotion and whatever you've given them hasn't really earned it. The emotion isn't authentic. But if you put beauty and its opposite together, it can render

KM: Is it the absence of people? Is it the perfection of line and yet we know the world is not perfect? Somehow you're capturing both of those things at once.

EB: Stepping away from the realism of the place, we might have flowers or people.

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Resist #3 and RESIST, 2019, In Elena’s studio.

People would always say, “why aren’t there any people?” Well, that's not what I was really showing. I'm not a portrait painter. It makes for stripping things down to the essence in a way. It is the opposite of being sentimental.

KM: I think maybe that's part of what gives the sense of lack of sentimentality. There's an emotional quality to it but it's not easy. It requires a viewer to take part in the painting to create or see that dimension of emotion. I look at these with the light falling in them and it gives a humanity even though there is no human in it.

KM: You know what’s really interesting? Even if you think about the spaces that you're rendering here as abstract because they’ve been “mashed-up” by taking different layers of images and spaces and pushing them together, you're also depicting light and lines and angles.They are familiar to us and there's a feeling to me, looking at the paintings, like I'm part of that space.

EB: That’s really good. I want to invite the viewer into the space. It's a certain kind of space and you're alone in that space. You have to engage that yourself.

EB: And people do have very different reactions. Some people might go into those spaces and think, “I feel so comfortable here and caressed by the light.” Other people might think it's lonely. People bring their own emotional mindsets to the work as well. I’m not telling you what to think.

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KM: You participate as the viewer - although I think you're right that it's hard to imagine barbed wire as unambiguous.

EB: This was an interval where I felt like I needed to put in something really horrible.

Maybe after the November elections, we'll be feeling more optimistic about everything and I can get rid of the barbed wire. In a way it was something that forced me to do that. All the pressures on us from even before the virus and the inhumanity of this country are getting to a place right now that I have never seen in my lifetime. I know there were bad times in the 50s with the McCarthy period and there was racism with Jim Crow. But somehow not in such an abundance and we didn't have somebody at the helm just egging people on.

I've always had this conflict about art and politics. In my life, I have always been an activist. But in my art, I always felt it wasn't suited to that kind of statement because it takes so long to be a painter. I used to be a photojournalist when I was younger. I used to photograph for black newspapers in New York City. I went to the demonstrations. I went to marches and did a lot of that work and it was much more of the moment. I really loved to paint at the same time and, as a painter, I couldn't be really of the moment. You spend two months on a painting and everything can change.

visiting critic. I didn't even know his work then.

Because I took pictures in all those old mansions that were empty, he looked at my photographs and, of course, those were the ones he was drawn to because of all his old houses from the depression era. It really inspired me so those were the houses that I started with. Some of them were inhabited but there were a lot of derelict ones then.

Because I couldn't set up lights in them, as most of them didn't have electricity, I ended up finding it was easier to paint them, and then I could put the lights in where I wanted. If it had a dark half and just a little light coming in a window, I could paint some light somewhere else. So that's what got me started painting way back then. When I was studying at Penn, it was Louis Kahn for architecture but I was also in the sculpture department and that was in this great old building. Frank Furness was the architect. The sculpture department was in the basement with these great columns and barreled walls. I used to go around the building and do pastels of the different spaces in the building.

Again, that was leading me to light and space.

My earliest work was black and white, just dealing with the light in a space.

KM: But you're providing opportunities within these spaces for people to feel emotions that are timeless.

When I went to Greece, the blues and the white came in. Then I stopped, because it became a cliche.

EB: That's what I'm hoping, but I have always had that contrast in my life.

KM: The DNA of light and line and space is coming right through even to your newest paintings. They really remind me of my Art History classes, learning about perspective.

KM: I'm curious how your painting practice evolved. You've told us a little about how photography informs your painting practice but how did you move from photography to painting and the particular media that you use as a painter?

EB: I never really do literal perspective. I have a relative in England who's always asking me questions about perspective, and I will say I know nothing about perspective. I just do it the way I see it. Sometimes I'll change things because I don't like the way they look. That's totally wrong from a perspective point of view.

EB: I actually started out as a painter. I went to school in Saratoga at Skidmore. I started taking pictures there for a summer photo course and we had Walker Evans as our 12

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KM: That's something I've talked to writers about too. You have to think that your reader comes to your book, comes to your painting, with their entire life experience and everything they know. They're creating an understanding of your work. It's not just that the painting that you have done is layered but the viewer brings their layer of knowledge on to that.

imagination was pulling you back to a particular kind of light that you only get a particular time of year.

EB: I was a little more concerned with seasons when I had a few sails that were stormy weather sails. They were kind of abstracted and it was much more about the weather outside. With my buildings, it's more abstracted from a particular time of day for light. Mostly it’s the sun at the end of the day when you might feel that golden light.

EB: That's a great analysis of what it is to look at a painting, because the painting is a template. It requires the viewer to complete what's happening. Some people will only see at a certain level, “oh, this is so real” or “it looks just like a picture.” And that's what they get from it. That's what they think is the highest thing that they can imagine. People look at things differently now. Or they're bringing whatever their idea of painting is.

KM: Golden hour. The perfect light for photography.

EB: I used to go out in the middle of the day in Greece and it was so damn hot. I suddenly realized I should get up at 6am and then go out again at 6pm in the evening so I could see the haze in a nice folded line. So that’s when these became much more about that type of light.

KM: You were saying you were an academic for years. For a lot of artists who are academics, there's just no time, headspace, or heart space during the school year to really practice. Or your practice gets set aside to a shrunken piece of time. When you would go for a summer to photograph, to travel and gather resources for your art, do you feel that there was a seasonal quality to your work?

KM: What about the size of your space? You recently moved from a much smaller space to this very generous space. When you were teaching, did you have a studio separate from your home? Did you have a studio at school?

EB: I had lofts, mostly a studio with a little living section. Depending upon the size of my studio the paintings would get bigger or smaller. I'm never going to get bigger than they are here. They were confined in that little room.

EB: I was in a pretty privileged space because I would only teach two or three days a week. I painted every day for about six hours when I'd come home from school. Maybe I'd have a four-hour class and I still had enough time to paint.

KM: It's like goldfish. Goldfish will get bigger if you give them a bigger bowl.

Now it's really horrible for professors, because most people are adjuncts and they're paid by the class. It used to be much different and I was really lucky to be in that time-space where teaching was a wonderful job to have for an artist.

EB: You can tell when I had a big studio here - 60 X 96 - all by myself.

KM: If you were working every day yearround, clearly you were absorbing whatever season you were in. It wasn't just that your

EB: You see artists who have a lot of assistants and huge studios and they do this giant work.

KM: So your relationship to space isn't just on the canvas. It's what space your images actually take up too?

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I've only ever had one assistant. I could probably learn how to do it but I haven't ever done that. It's sort of the trend now for bigger spaces. I went recently to this Gerhard Richter show and most of them were huge. You could see a few smaller works but most of them were tremendous. You're more likely to get a museum show if you have really large work, or really rich people with huge houses or warehouse spaces to keep their work in. It's about marketing. They compare this with the Renaissance. Artists had big studios with a lot of assistants so there is a history to it.

trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Is there a question somewhere deep in you that you're trying to answer?

EB: There are questions all along that you could take like inspirations. Several years ago, I went to Japan for a month and I stayed on this island called Naoshima. It’s an island devoted to art and architecture. I stayed in a building that was done by Tadao Ando, somebody who's been very inspiring to me.

He also designed several museums on the island for specific works of art. There were some inspirational things in some of those museums and the museums themselves were also inspiring. These things help foster your ideas and put you in a little different direction, or they lead you to other things. The architecture in the Cyclades that I was very interested in led me in another direction.

Louis Kahn got some ideas going. I think Walker Evans in his photographs got a few ideas going for me. I used to look at different artists. I remember the prison series by Piranesi. You would see all of these stairways going up to no place. For a while I got into stairways and things that were a little bit surreal.

EB: Some of the really big artists, they have 100 assistants. Ai Weiwei has a factory in China! An artist in the city, Marilyn Minter, has about 20 assistants. During this COVID period, she had to call in all her instructions to various assistants. Some artists have been kind of criticized if they haven’t even put their hand to the work. Is it just their idea? There is something to that.

I had an assistant who used to work by my side. He was an illustrator. I think he could draw a straighter line than I could but he wouldn't know what color to pick up. I gave him the image and then I had to tell him what colors to use. There are a lot of different aspects that go into making up an artist's work. If somebody wants to steal this? Go ahead, let them try. This is something that's evolved over forty of fifty years for me. I've been painting since I was nine. I could show you some things from Skidmore and you'll say, “oh yeah, that’s Elena’s.”

I ask myself, Is this getting too easy? Do I have to change something? Or am I going in a wrong direction? It's never smooth sailing.

When I came to the Adirondacks, I was so overwhelmed by nature here. I fooled around with things but it seemed like there were too many parts everywhere. It was too much going on. It didn't work for me to paint outdoors or paint nature. I felt like it was all there already.

So can somebody just pop in and do it? I don't know.

KM: I love to hear about and think about an artist’s project. Every artist is working toward something. And it may be something that they resolve over time and then they work towards something else. There's a quote by Albert Camus, “A man's work is nothing but this slow

It’s ever-changing, depending upon what your experiences are. Like this time period, this will change things. It’s part of the development.

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WEDNESDAY CRIT

DENNIS DELAY Dennis Delay's current body of work explores the places and people of his Irish immigrant ancestors, who fled famine and religious persecution and settled in the Adirondacks in the mid 1800s. For a short period, some of them lived on and farmed the land of present-day Craigardan.

Black River #2, 2020

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Black River #1, 2020

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Phytophthora Infestans (Potato late blight fungus), graphite on paper, work in progress

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Ceramics by Stellah De Ville. De Ville is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer. Her peripatetic working life has taken her from Melbourne to San Francisco and New York and now, back again to California. While focusing on developing her technique in ceramics, her creative practice also extends to installation, interiors, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and functional ware. Her work explores the themes of entropy and transmutation and the inherent beauty to be found in destruction and rebirth. Much of her work is informed by her experiences of being an outsider and immigrant. She has exhibited her award-winning work in her native Australia as well as Europe and the USA.

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THURSDAYCHECKIN

RE-EMERGING

By TaraMarie Perri

One recent snowy February morning, I gently wept in front of Willem Claesz Heda’s Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware, a painting in The Met’s current Dutch Masterpieces exhibit.

Dutch painters have always been lauded for their mastery of light, reflection, detail, and realism.

First glimpsed with the click of a slide projector in a stuffy classroom as an art history major, I made many efforts to view these works in person whenever possible.

me. I recalled that a full year prior, two weeks after New York shut down, I was lured by their velvety purple scent to a farmer’s table at my local market alongside their fellow early spring ambassadors of crocuses and daffodils. Masks and social distancing were new concepts then and navigating the market was awkward. Beyond their intoxicating smell, I brought the hyacinths home with me for their graceful company. I recognize now that the ways I tended to the bulbs over the year were not so different from how I had to tend to myself. Affirmation of our own human life cycles can often be found alongside nature. Dormancy is an often overlooked yet necessary phase within a life cycle. Growth requires a period of time for storing nutrients, gaining strength, and waiting for the right conditions.

What was it about this particular painting and viewing that brought me to tears? The scene nearly knocked me to my knees as I exhaled my share of the collectively-held breath of sensory deprivation and relative solitude we experienced over the last year. I could smell the astringency of the partially peeled and tactile citrine-yellow lemon. My hand naturally curled into a “C” shape as if to upright the overturned silver tazza on the table. The reflective oyster flesh, knife, and drinking glass against the somber background unified a boundless sea and the intimate setting of a quiet meal. No doubt, Heda’s painting indicates a solitary scene. That winter morning, however, it transformed into an offering for anyone coming to his table, seeking nourishment or company.

It seemed unimaginable we would experience the cycle of an entire year living primarily as indoor creatures when we began sheltering in place in March 2020. At the table of a Dutch master and within a hyacinth’s life cycle of one year, the experience of my own year has gained new perspective.

As winter gives way to spring each year, we are supported in all our usual intentions for renewal.

With spring’s arrival, nature calls and we thrive more easily outdoors. We can get back in touch with the vital experience of what it means to be alive and living.

One recent sunny March morning, I climbed out onto my urban outdoor space to get a pot out of the trunk where I store supplies over the winter.

Last fall I tucked five hyacinth bulbs, a grouping I enjoyed in full bloom last spring, into a large pot, after dutifully restoring their lifeforce in a cool dark place over the summer and a single month in the refrigerator next to the pickles and olives.

When I lifted the trunk lid, five vibrant green upshoots were growing, ready and willing to thrive on the outside and carrying a message for

As winter gives way to spring this year, we are supported in revealing new and tender - perhaps simpler - ways of being that were seeded in response to a year of challenges. Every spring, and especially this one, we are invited to reemerge with lifeforce and tried and true grace.

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FRIDAYLECTURESERIES

SPOKEN EARTH DANCES

By Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo / The Talking Wings Collective

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Blooming. Ahna’wate River, 2020. Talking Wings Collective

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As the lungs of our planet burn, the memories of past destruction haunt our present. The photographic series Spoken Earth Dances explores the environmental memory of the forest of Northeast Turtle Island. In a series of abstract expressionist photographs, The Talking Wings storytelling collective documents their silent conversation with the land. Through site- specific dance pieces, we resurrect layers of forgotten histories and contextualize our climate emergency.

Throughout Turtle Island, Abya Yala, the American Continent, entire forests were erased, sold, burned, and removed, to make way for a destroyer’s manifest destiny. The descendants of these colonizers inhabit the pilfered land. Little do they care to remember or recognize the fact that they are living in the negated memory of their ancestors’ expansion. As humans, we have become overly used to living with ghosts.

How to make these silences speak? How do we allow them to share the memory our history has chosen to gloss over and transform?

Living with Ghosts Memories, the marks of history, are carved into our environment. Nature bears the scars of centuries of human exploitation. We see these wounds in the slender trunks of young trees, in forests that are slowly finding the strength to rediscover themselves after extensive logging. We see them in rivers; waters that rush downstream to pool in city swamps. These memories are also written on our very skin, for we are all part of this landscape, this silent history.

Filling Silences with Movement We at Talking Wings have chosen to replace silence with silence, communicate untold stories/ memories through movement. The human body becomes our mouthpiece, while physical expressions are transformed into the letters of a long-lost language. To tell the story of forests and their/our future, one needs to include this vocabulary of silences.

We perform improvised dances on sites that have suffered current and/or past massive deforestation. Through the camera lens, we mix fragments of human elements with the organic flow of a sometimes dead, sometimes blossoming nature. The human anatomy becomes a puzzle of disjointed limbs, which morph within the frame, becoming something illusive, not quite tangible.

The talking bodies allow the land’s memory to participate in this dance of past, present, and future.

After a tree falls, and its crash has reverberated through the ripped soil, we are left with a spectacular silence. This void fills the forest or cleared desert, engulfing the world in suspended shock. This silence can’t be quantified and measured. It is impossible to commodify it, turn the lack of sound into a product.

Once humans have hauled this being away, burned the wasted carcass (wasted because it has been stolen, its nutrients removed from their environment), the entire forest community mourns this lost entity. A vital conversationalist, caretaker, nurturer has been replaced by looming phantoms.

A — a ghost the humans tend to intentionally ignore.

Through the abstraction of the human form, we discover the signs development has left on the earth. The body thus becomes a symbol of the voices of fallen trees, the void of destroyed ecosystems, and the new growth that regenerates from the ashes. The goal of Talking Wings is to create a movement language of what has been forgotten. We want to recontextualize the process that has led to a sixth global mass extinction, and call for renewed consciousness of the land, its inhabitants, and their collective memory.

As forests burn across the world, the global human community gasps at the images of carbonized tree limbs. It trembles, as it fears the global catastrophe. Yet, most of these humans don’t hear the trees catch fire, explode and tumble. They aren’t left with the physical absence of their chatter. They won’t miss what the tree has said, once its roots are removed from the ground.

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ABOVE: Dam. Ahna’wate River, 2020. Talking Wings Collective BELOW: In-between. Nikentsake River, 2020. Talking Wings Collective These photographic stills are part of videos, which can be found online at www.talking-wings.com

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Friends. Quabbin Watershed, 2019. Talking Wings Collective

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SATURDAYFARMSHARE

WHAT I’M READING

By Janelle A. Schwartz Winter is melting into spring. With each lenthened day, my daughter and I take a muddy bike ride down our dirt road. We wind our way over crumbling bridges to check out beaver dams and the pull of the brook’s water ever downstream, the swelling birdsong and the knock-knock-knocks of woodpeckers, the tenacious buzz of pollinators newly released from slumber. We tally the latest trees downed by wind, human, beaver, or bird. But our main mission, our motivation for biking wild, is to visit the roadside swales where clutches of frog eggs will soon be percolating.

In seasons past, day after day, we would spy on their cloistered movements, their bubbles a mirror into our own movements: isolated yet thriving under the most tenuous of conditions.

“What if the water the eggs are sitting in evaporates?” asks my daughter. “How will they get out of their eggs?” “Where is their food?”

“Can they talk to each other in there?” “Look!

They are all dancing!”

of devastation. Reading through these books again, knowing that soon the frogs’ eggs will morph into tadpoles, I find myself better able to embrace the inseparability of danger and safety, isolation and community.

The Ecological Thought ruminates on how “we become aware of the world at the precise moment at which are are ‘destroying it’ — or at any rate, globally reshaping it.” We are in this moment of awareness (we always already are).

It is violent and uplifting even as we fall.

Prodigal Summer presents a keyhole treatment of this singular-yet-collective moment, lacing three individual stories within the verdant setting of one Appalachian summer. The Overstory explodes this view, giving us a telescoped tale across generations and lands. In all three, the natural world is the return we must root in, the “prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It can wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground can resist welcoming it back when it comes” (Prodigal Summer). With this, I venture toward the unfolding of spring and a coming (back) together in real space… when the time is right.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to restructure our lives one year out, I find myself leaning on a particular triptych of literary works: The Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton; Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver; and The Overstory by Richard Powers. Together, as I read them through these strained (even horrific) times, these three books package the gift of time, enmeshment, space, and courage. They make tangible the paradox of ephemera, display the fissures of what bring us together, offer t h e n at u ra l w o r l d a s a s l a p a n d a n ameliorative, and demand renewal in the face

Janelle is the mother to a sensational fouryear-old, whose primary approach to all things begins with the question “What if?” and continues with the declaration “But, wait… I have a better idea!” Janelle is also an aspiring beekeeper, worm cultivator, and avid reader.

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ABOVE: Cherry Desk by David Speert BELOW: Ceramic bowl by Stellah De Ville

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SUNDAYPOSTCARDPROJECT

THE ART OF IMPROVISATION

By Felix Haskins Last year, I started going to the Lake Champlain Waldorf School. In Waldorf education, playing a musical instrument is mandatory from 3rd grade onward. The music teacher decides the instrument for you based on your temperament, and I was chosen to play the cello. I am still playing it now, and enjoying it very much.

a natural, touring Europe to play for kings and queens because he could improvise so beautifully at a very young age.

But why do this? Why try to gain this skill when there is a relatively easier way to make music?

Because if it is done right, it can be more beautiful than a masterpiece that took ten years to compose. This is because an improvised melody has a quality that comes straight from the heart, and composed melodies do not always hold this quality. This is not to say composed melodies are “bad,” as no art can be judged this way.

My dad was also very excited, as he is a musician and composer, and he introduced me to a different way to play my instrument: improvising.

The first definition of improvising that comes up on the internet is: to create and perform (music, drama, or verse) spontaneously or without preparation. In music, this simply means to make up music and play it on the spot (often known as jamming.)

But as shown in the definition, improvising isn’t just about music. Improvising can apply to almost anything, and it can help you find new ways to do things. Recipes, for example, are created by improvising. Say I’m making muffins. If I find them too sweet, the next time I use less sugar than called for, and add more flour to compensate. I’ve just invented a new type of muffin! In nature, everything is improvised. The wind never knows in advance how strong it will be, and the clouds never know when it will rain.

In medieval times, troubadours were improvisers, but they improvised the lyrics over popular melodies of the time. In Baroque music, the basso continuo (bass line) was composed beforehand, but the other players improvised their parts on top of it. In modern concertos, sometimes there is a solo called a cadenza, which is often improvised by a soloist to show their musical skill. The cadenza is one of the few remaining examples of improvising in modern classical music.

But here a few questions arise: If nature is improvised, how can it create ecosystems with such perfect balance? If nature is improvised, how is it not a chaotic mess? What if nature isn’t improvised; what if nature just is? Perhaps nature is like an object rather than a force, working within itself to create what we call the universe. Or perhaps it is the improvisations of an unknown number of life forms all working together? I don’t know what is true. I will continue to imagine…and improvise.

But improvising is more than just playing without printed music. Improvising is aspiring to achieve the ultimate musical beauty while composing the music as one plays it.

As it sounds, this does not always come easy.

Some can improvise naturally, while others strive to, and spend their lives trying. Mozart himself was

IMPROVISATION Click the audio link at right, or listen to Felix’s postcards online at: www.craigardan.org/sundaypostcardproject

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Craigardan occupies the Indigenous lands and waters of the Kanienʼkehá:ka people, keepers of the Eastern Door of the Six Nations Rotinoshoni.

We acknowledge that Kanienʼkehá:ka people still safeguard the mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes of Kohserà:ke, as their ancestors had done for millennia.

We bring our minds together as one as we give our greetings and our thanks to the Kanienʼkehá:ka people and their relatives among the Six Nations for being on their land today.

We affirm our obligations to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things.

We honor the Great Law of Peace and Indigenous treaties that made these lifegiving spaces a shared “dish with one spoon” with Wabanaki and Anishinaabe peoples, who have held these lands as sacred since time immemorial.

We recognize our Indigenous neighbors at Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, Ganienkeh Territory, Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community, Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Mohawks of Kanesatake, Oneida Indian Nation, Abenaki Nation at Missisquoi, the Koasek Band of the Koas Abenaki Nation, Elnu Abenaki Tribe, the Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe, and the Abenakis at Odanak as the original stewards of the land and their past, present, and future connections to their sacred spaces within the Adirondack Park.

We accept responsibility for deceptive land sales and broken treaties that enabled non-Native settlers to establish this farm on Indigenous land more than two centuries ago.

We commit ourselves to healing the intergenerational traumas of colonization, racial discrimination, and environmental degredation through mutually beneficial alliances with our Indigenous neighbors to build sustainable systems that integrate the needs of human communities with the integrity of the natural world.

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