Table of
CONT ENTS
1
FEATURES //
· FEATURED ARTIST: LIINA KLAUSS · SERGEY GUSEV · SAM WILKINSON
2
ART //
3
FICTION//
· CÒISEAM MACNEILL ( PHOTOS BY VICTORIA SENDRA) · F.E. LEHANE
· KIYARY · VIRGINIA LEKUONA · SIRIA FERRER SAINZ-PARDO · MELANIE WICHLEIN · KIRSTY MEADE · BEN CARTER · LAURA GARCÍA BORREGO
4
POETRY// · AARON FACER · AMY JASEK · JIM HILTON · BELLA PELSTER · DANIELLE ZIPKIN · MEADOW Z · OSKAR LEONARD · JACK STACEY
VAINE // FEATURES 10
FEATURED ARTIST: LIINA KLAUSS Interview Liina klauss is a German land-artist who explores visual and conceptual perceptions of waste, specifically marine pollution. She translates environmental pollution into over-flowing installations of screaming colours and horrifying beauty. After quitting her career as a fashion-designer she began making environmental art and has since realised several environmental art projects in Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan. She collaborates with various schools, universities and corporates facilitating art-awareness-activism projects. Her installation ‘5000 lost soles’ is a permanent feature of the Potatohead Beach Club in Bali. How did you first become interested in environmental activism? I never became interested, I always was. It’s more about connection, about being in tune with nature. A communication, not with words but with my whole being, my skin, touch, smell and my intuition, if you want to call it that. We all have that connection, just some listen and trust more in it than others. I grew up in Germany in the 80s with my hippie mom in rural Bavaria with little financial means. We grew our own veggies, improvised a lot and were creative with what is gerneally considered ‘nothing’: leaves, soil, twigs. The stream nearby, the apple trees, the witches’ forest (Hexenwäldchen) were my childhood community. I think I was an environmental activist from the beginning.
VAINE // FEATURES 11 What initially inspired you to make art out of waste? There was a trigger moment in 2011 when my family was camping on a remote beach on an outlaying island of Hong Kong. For a full week I explored that beach from the waterline to the rocks to the vegetation. What I found was knee-deep marine plastic pollution: very recent plastics as well as plastics decades old already broken up into micro-plastics. What astonished me most was that I have never read or seen any reports on this environmental disaster. I transformed the shock into creative expression: a rainbow made from rubbish, ocean plastics and natural materials side by side, just as I found them. Sharing the image of that very first trash-land-art on facebook stirred up a big discussion and eventually the attention of the press and media. Art is powerful because it lets you see the truth from a different angle. The German word “wahrnehmen” sums it up: it translates into “perceiving truth” and “taking truth”. Taking it in and, at the same time, taking it out of context and out into the world for others to see. How many volunteers typically take part in helping you create an installation? Anywhere from 1 to 50 volunteers help create an outdoor trash- land-art. They come from all walks of life: elementary school kids, corporate employees, marine scientists or artist friends. I want to show them a different perspective on what we consider “waste”. Everything we throw away comes back to us
eventually via the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we grow crops and raise animals on. Everything is circular, not linear. In nature this becomes so obvious. It is exactly this direct, physical confrontation with man-made pollution, in combination with pristine nature and a creative task that starts a process of positive change. Touching and letting yourself be touched. This change is visible in the landscape as well as in people.
Is it difficult for you to get permission to install your works in public places? Yes, it is. There is a social taboo on waste. It is perceived not only as worthless, but as dirty and unhygienic. Our society is used to making waste “go away”, by bagging it up and putting it out of sight and out of mind. It literally disappears from our visual radar.
32 32 VAINE // ART
‘The amazon forest is on fire and every living creature too’ by Kiyary
VAINE // ART 33
50 VAINE // FICTION 50
LISTEN WORDS BY CÒISEAM MACNÈILL PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTORIA SENDRA It has been raining in very short bursts. Barely a moment at a time. The sun is bright, but seems to be coming from all the sky at once, as thick clouds, pale grey, disperse its light widely to hide its origin. The trees, barely more than saplings, dangle their limp branches out to angle nascent leaf-buds towards the sky, hoping to soak up the first bright day of April when it comes. There are no old trees here. Their age bowed them, and the ones that were not felled by storms and gales were carved into shapes. Owls and foxes and waterfowl. A vast graven image stands regal over them all. A kind faced bear, with an infant’s tusks. Long past, children were warned of wolves and hobs who would eat them up, or steal them away if they ventured into the mirk of the trees. This tree, rendered in the likeness of their gentle guardian, stands so that they know that no child will ever have to fear the wild. A coarse gravel path leads my way, between the managed trees by the water’s edge, and the unkempt bracken of the high embankment. There the trees are allowed to grow. No forester comes to tend them, few deer eat back the ferns. There is life there, fresh life, that grows each spring, but still it is quiet. No verdancy of the hunting ground, nor the slow rumble of the primordial forests. The trees grow, and wane, and die, and grow again, but never with new theme, never with variation in the cycle. Along this path, moving grit and leaves out of my way as I go, the space opens. A beach of hardened, compacted sand borders nearly stagnant water, barely fit for the ducks, and the moorhens, and the signets who’s feathers have only just blanched. Another felled tree lies there, carved into a long throne for the people who have built their stone houses all around the lochan. The high back of this seat, made
Photography by Victoria Sendra
VAINE // FICTION 51 in the shape of a heron, watches the young lovers who look out over the reeds and the fowl. No heron has lived here in the years that these two have seen, but they nestle under its stoic protection. Hair moistened and smelling from the showers. I pick up the smell of damp earth and bring it to them, casting it to their faces. I run between her fingers, then his, tangling her hair around her neck, and brushing his from his eyes so she can see them. I want to listen in to them, to hear what they say under their breaths, so close that the barely need their voices. I often cling close. People would be surprised how often I can hear the thoughts they keep hidden. When they are alone they lend voice, just a fraction of a voice, to these thoughts. Too quiet, too weak to ever reach another’ ear, their lips barely moving, but I am there, to snatch the words and bear them safely away. I want to take a little of what these two say to each other. Just the shape of it, the warmth of their breath. To carry it with me a little, but this is a peaceful moment. Nothing needs to be said between them and so nothing is. After long seconds I pass. I’m unable to stay. I am not the only voyeur upon this moment. By the water stands a solitary tree, slant, whose trunk looms precariously over the water. He has lasted this long, but some day, as the years of snow weigh on his branches, he will fall in. Whether it is wind or frost or the least fortunate child to climb him, his roots’ grip in the earth will be too little, or the trunk’s strength will give, and he will join the mud below. I was there, long centuries ago, when his roots first met the earth. He had a name, poor boy. I might have known him. I’m not sure. Long ago, when this water was a mirror in which the trees and hills saw their own majesty. Long ago, when the spit of land in the middle was less overgrown, and people had reason to go there. This poor boy had seen his father disappear into the black water, who has seen his father before him. The still surface belying the grasping mirk below. The poor boy was so afraid. I heard him yell. Not for attention, or surprise, but something more dissonant. As his balance left him, and the water seemed ready to open
Còiseam MacNèill spends his time meandering around the sodden walks of the West of Scotland, when he’s not studying philosophy in Kent. Many of his stories pick up from where someone finds themself in conversation with the land around them, the trees, the rain, and the Sìdhe who wander in and out of his work without regard for invitation, theme, or genre. When in less mystical moods, his writing paces around over memory and the stories we tell ourselves in life.
VAINE // POETRY 70
Bella Pelster views writing as a way to create something out of chaotic, pure emotion, no matter how strange and unseemly that something is. As we increasingly spend more of our lives online, there’s a tendency to filter out the ugly - and this is something that Bella tries to avoid in her writing. If we honour what’s undesirable, we may take inspiration from it. When she’s not scurrying to and from part-time jobs or doing university work, Bella loves visiting charity shops and watching stop-motion films. @bellapelster
VAINE // POETRY 71
QUALIFIED IN DESTRUCTION POEM BY BELLA PELSTER ILLUSTRATION BY SIRIA FERRER
A murmur has begun among the trees Their greenness finally dulled sunken shapes etched into their leaves soon to appear in your flesh. You who have let the misshapen rot Sliced their sisters up and served only the best cuts To that thing in the corner with the eight beady eyes and the drooling mouth. You who crush the fae underneath your feet great hunks of meat stuffed in brogues. Pushing their corpses into the soil And plucking them out, one by one only to shove them into your gaping maw. You who erected your towers Piercing them into the hearts of the angels and drowned them in great grey gas. Poisoned them from the inside With pompous plastic promises. Your greying moustache cannot hide That sickening stench of death of the kraken’s swollen corpse, tossed back and forth with the tide dark oil decorating its grave. Too long has the Dreamtime burned great red flames lick at its fabric turning dream to nightmare to reality as you watch in your great tower unassuming of what is waiting below.
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