Tag: landscape
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Cereal
Once, more than 10,000 years ago, Triticum – cereal – was a wild-growing genus with many varieties. Due to their nutritious grains, some of these varieties were cultivated by humans. The resulting access to a more structured food source lead to a whole new form of living, eating and digesting. A process that simultaneously affected…
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To Dig a Hole (You Create a Heap)
Here’s a joke… Question: Who made money during the Gold Rush? Answer: The ones who sold the shovels. “You were asked to dig a hole? Do you understand how that sounds very strange?” When I told this to a friend, they seemed perplexed. And while I was initially confused by their response,…
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Revisiting a Geography of Hope
To be a farmer, at any point in history, means you grow food. You steward the land – soil, water, air, energy, plants, and animals – and make a living from its increase. It seems simple, at least in purpose, if not in practice: Grow good food. Now, in the twenty-first century, awareness is growing…
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Landscape Amnesia
As the last horse trailer passes you by on the potholed road you take an exit. Across a green pasture you park the car. You stretch your legs. Gravel grinds underneath the feet while walking towards the bar – “Tattan’s Ring View Bar” it reads on the yellowish plastered building. Flowers in pots await under…
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Rural Art is…
This is an extract from Myvillages, ‘Rural Art Is…’, in The Rural, eds. Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra (London: Whitechapel Gallery/Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019) If you don’t like monocultures – whether in art or agriculture or elsewhere – you will like this book. The Rural questions and frustrates the current cultural hegemony…
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Earth Turned Honey
Moksha The desert has no memory. Sun beats on its chest, collarbone glistens: I wait for rain, an angry sea filling the sky to break, blow, burn, make a new world order. Agave pierces clouds while amethyst mountains rest in heavy sleep. I have asked permission to make this desolate ground my home. Beneath…
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Undertow
Walking the Edge A trusted mentor once told me, having read my work, “You often write about the meeting places of land and water.” She was right, though I’d never thought about the habit before; my tendency to do so was neither intentional nor premeditated. “There are few things more ancient than humans walking to…
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A Foraged Map
Spread over my kitchen table, emptied from the various cloth bags and tubs, were the wild plants that I’d gathered that day. As I viewed them from above, deliberating as to what kind of meal I could make that would include them all, the array of textures conspired to suggest a visual record of the…
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12 Circular Walks
Having been working on 180 degree panoramic drawings of opposite sides of the Severn, my attention shifted to exploring 360 degree imagery, something more immersive. The all-seeing eye of the 360 degree lens is hard to hide from. I began to frame myself within the ‘dome’, initially in stills, copying the posture of Caspar David…
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The Wandering Walk
The Wandering Walk is a site-specific installation located on the South Fyn Danish Island of Ærø. It engages with the familiar practice of walking as a mode of perception to explore and enrich the complex and shifting relationships between humans and nature. The installation is focused around the celebrated northern region of Vitsø. Frequently walked…
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Museum: Ursus americanus
On birches, bears, and the birth of farm animals: three new poems by Todd Davis.