co-director, Elizabeth Walden
07/17 Upcoming presentation in the Netherlands at the ACLA Conference:
Environmental Aesthetics: Climbing Down into the Post-Industrial Rural Landscape
Environmental Aesthetics: Climbing Down into the Post-Industrial Rural Landscape
Cheri G. lights the prairie (image E. Walden. 2016)
Elizabeth Walden - (Image K. Lair)
Elizabeth Walden recently presented work on the post-industrial rural environment at American Society of Environmental Historians (ASEH) and World Congress of Environmental History (WCEH) and collaborated this fall with artist Ann Torke at WAS.
Walking the Oaks: New's Eve 2014 at the Westbrook Artists' Site
The idea that art refers to a distinct realm of human activity or that it produces beautiful and valuable objects easily traded in a market is a very historically specific notion, one that’s been interrogated for many decades already within a still largely confined art practice. The actions undertaken at WAS are mindful of a much longer tradition that that places art in relation to ritual and play as practices that produce community bonds and elaborate a relationship to place.
In the spirit of this longer tradition, we designed and performed, playfully but sincerely, a New Year’s Eve ritual this year at WAS. There are no metaphysical or new age beliefs implied by our ritual. Rather, we hold simply that what you do and how you do it matters. Treating the land with regard and acknowledging our responsibility to it, as well as our dependence upon it, is part of the mission of WAS. In this dark season when the land can seem hostile and central heating beckons, we wanted a reason to get outside and to acknowledge the coming of a new year at WAS. (Plus, we were far from any opportunities for the very fine community rituals typically associated with New Year’s Eve.)
The night was frigid, but calm and clear. A few days off of the full moon, our shadows were sharply drawn on the snow. We walked a circuit of the property moving from one to another of the Oak groves that were released from the undergrowth this year. The “beating of the bounds,” the ancient practice of walking the boundaries of the commons was a ritual that confirmed and established both territory and community, mapping one upon the other in a relation of interdependence. We were not concerned to confirm the property line, we walked, rather, the contours of our efforts to remediate the Oak savannah ecosystem on the property. The Oaks are old-timers; some of them were likely alive before the prairie was plowed under. As the undergrowth of invasive species was removed, these giants emerged as distinct personalities. We see them as the living ancestors of all the life at WAS. Walking the Oaks confirms and establishes a community of human and non-human life defined less by space than by time.
We made four stops along the way to mark the terrain with meaning and to consider the various dimensions of our experience at WAS. At the first oak grove, we made private resolutions for our personal development in the coming year. At the second we shared declarations of appreciation for our human relationships. At the third we thanked the land for everything it has given us in the last year— the poison ivy and the ticks, as well as the wonder and sense of purpose. We left a small offering of fruit and nuts for whomever would have it at the base of this Oak. At the fourth, we acknowledge the larger contexts within which the land at WAS figures—geographical, economic, historical, ecological, cosmological, cultural. In creating a relationship to place, we seek not to leave the larger world behind, but to explore a model of care and creativity informed by and, we hope, informing of the world beyond the bounds of WAS. We walked home over the dark pasture delighted by the stars and wishing we knew more of the constellations that earlier people had playfully bound together with myths and the names of animals.