Ends of the garden

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Garden Slideshow May to October

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Dirt Issue On Site 26 1of 3 pages

Here’s how the creaturality garden article looked in On Site p.15. Here’s an easier to read version, maybe

Creaturality

Involvement with the ‘higher’ levels of culture is comparatively optional – but no one can escape the conditions of creaturality, of eating and drinking and domestic life…
Norman Bryson (1992)  in Looking at the Overlooked

The creaturality garden project wonders at the muffled histories and stories passed over and lying underfoot, beneath and between the paved-over landscapes of public spaces. “We have always been here”, says an anishinabeg woman as she introduced a song at the drumming circle I attended. Traces of The People show another history of indwelling 9-15,000 years before we ‘newcomers’ arrived to start telling quite a different tale

Having recently completed a Master’s thesis entitled ‘Art, Nature and the Virtual
Environment’ I am using the thesis paper as pulp material for compost in a
garden/installation project on site in the backyard of the Gardener House Studios at Britannia Bay beach in Ottawa. I have an itinerant residency there this summer.

In a raised bed planter built out of discarded books and filled with dirt, I am growing a Haudenosaunee or Iroquois “Three Sisters” companion planting, which consists of corn, beans, and squash plants.

In this way I attempt to de-colonize the site while bringing back traditional food growing to a typically landscaped beachside park, beside a river previously navigated by a mostly exterminated aboriginal culture.

Besides my thesis I wonder what else might be buried at the bottom of the garden? Some online digging reveals to me that ‘The history of the Ottawa River watershed is inseparable from the history of the Algonquin Nation’ – except that in fact it has been separated from it. Chasing words and the empty spaces between them, (and remembering the Britannia of  ‘Rule Britannia’!) I find out that the history of the anishinabeg and other local indigenous peoples is not the kind of knowledge made available for surface consultation by a visiting public. The archives box at Britannia Bay reads as point form history beginning with “Capt. John Lebreton (vet. of the War of 1812) acquired  landgrant” (sic). What is left out between the lines of historical text are the extant land claims and treaty agreements collectively ‘overlooked’ by government officers and paper mill barons such as Philemon Wright. The waterways became colonized in the service of pulp and paper industries.

In multiple ways the ‘base’ material of aboriginal indwelling was ‘disappeared’. Like so many other species of things, it’s been written out, but perhaps leaving traces behind for newer ‘tracts’.

Outside the closed narratives and beyond the frame of the books used to build the planter, I read with Norman Bryson in Looking at the Overlooked – a book I frequently open to pages about ‘rhopography’, which he distinguishes from ‘megalography’:

Megalography is the depiction of those things in the world which are great – the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of history. Rhopography ( from rhopos, trivial objects, small wares, trifles) is the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ overlooks … The concept of importance can arise only by separating itself from what it declares as trivial and insignificant; ‘importance’ generates ‘waste’, what is sometimes preterite, that which is excluded or passed over.   p. 61

As I try to write this piece while most of the household is out of the house, I break to mop the floors of dirt tracked in by kids and dogs, noticing the traces, and the ability of dirt to be imprinted on, in and through.

The creaturality project tracks my ongoing 20-year accumulation of debris and ideas related to domestic concerns about dirt, my dirt collection stories-about-dirt, food procuration from dirt, cooking, serving and eating, and the kinds of attention that circulate through these processes. Much is discarded after being used up in other ways. What is surplus? What is loss? What is waste? Can what is leftover still be used as compost for the future?

On the backs of shopping lists and other scraps torn up from re-cycled computer paper
imprinted on the face side with proposals for under-funded art projects, I draw up itineraries and to-do lists that might recompose my domestic world into art. I keep scraps of ideas travelling in the linted pockets of my housecoat. Dirt spills over, floats around and sometimes settles, creating conditions for another kind of pedogenesis.

Berlin Wall dirt ‘lightly salted’

The packet of potato crisps to the right, contains a small chunk of the Berlin wall.

Posted in On Site #26,  [http://www.onsitereview.ca/onsite26dirt]   here’s a larger version:

On Site Dirt Issue and dirt stories

The On Site magazine ‘Dirt’ issue is released, with an article in it by me “Dirt Bank”.

http://www.onsitereview.ca/onsite26dirt

Here’s another story from the Dirt Bank

From the On Site article, a scan of page 2 with photo of dirt bank:

 

Turning Nature Into Art (2): Unable to Return

I also collect plastic packaging and bits of shrink wrap that encase chiclets of gum and batteries for instance, as well as almost everything that can be bought or sold.  By the 90‘s ever more things were ever more thingified, shrink wrapped and fetishized, observable through a clear, smooth transparent layer, set into individualized compartments and set apart as events no longer a part of, but separate in their perfect defenses. When you got them home, you could peel off that unfleshy skin releasing them into the world, permeable and available to be permeated, handled and lived-in, on and through, prepositionally in the life world beyond plastic.

I exaggerate, but only a bit. Because thirty years has not made a mark on the poor mouse, I wonder if all the encasing, individualizing, and preserving of ultimately disposable items, also contains for us ‘Westerners’ the rather sick idea of a containable, and signature ego, over-developed in order to function independent of and from inter-relations with the world and the other possible collaborators that might bind us to it? Is the mouse thus become a cryogenic ecological nightmare? A horrific existing beyond the mutability of everything else?

I feel sorry for it. The making of it into an object underlined for me my own mortality. Yet, object-ified- I now wonder at the Cartesian implications of the thing-in-itself held back from the world, organized to observe perfectly its lack of relationship. No longer bound by the collective might our loneliness become complete?
What were the ecological systems I was embedded in during art school in the 80′s?  Did it matter that the expressed cultivation and exaggeration of the signature individual artistic ego was actively promoted? Or even that I just felt it was? As a young woman, I had to inhabit the coffin of an art world where the male ego seemed central to it; the rest of the art world vampires fed off of it. “You can not be female, have children, and be an artist”; “Take your iron and go home”- these were some of the comments in the art department to female students at that time. So as far as my female student self  knew, there was no other way. In order to ‘suceed’, develop a male ego.  That was how the art-world ecology sustained itself.

Can I have become eco-oriented in my work due to the dissolution of artificial residues in my own body? Might Cartesian ‘objectivity’ be another artificial residue? In taking off the plastic packaging and becoming permeable,  have merely newer deleriums taken me over at the cost of lost ‘objectivity’? How much ego do you need in order to survive in a left-brain world?

Born into a certain point of ‘history’ and art history (actually it was The End of History and the Last Man – Fukayama was treated like he was omniscient, while Harold Bloom went to the defense of the Western ‘canon’), born in a certain geographical place, under particular circumstances and life histories, we carry the stories of that time, those places, and those particulars inside our bodies and through our lives. As artists, these particulars function as the ground and background that we draw from for our work. We may not even be conscious of them. But we inhabit them and they inhabit(us).

So may be this is why at present, my bitter distaste for this chunk of plastic containing the fragile remains of a tiny mouse registers as physical revulsion to both the material and the ‘subject’ I created by the severing of it from all its relations, histories and stories. I distanced my self in the blockages contained in the block of plastic resin. The mouse is permanently cut off, “unable to return to the gods that made it“.