I took part in the Fluid Earth artist residency at Groundwork Gallery this summer. The exhibition opens on 4th October, and I will be showing a wall-hanging of illustrations and two books available to read, including Wild Nature Human Nature. See the text and illustrations from my other piece, Water Falls Springs Rise, here.
As one outcome, I made a double-sided concertina photo book, exploring the binary construct of wild and human nature. I was thinking about the role of the human imagination in constructing, harming and helping our living planet. William Blake was a key inspiration in writing the short poems, with some of his phrases altered or used as seeds. Other moments in the poems are based on talks and conversations with site stewards and experts, such as Nick Acheson. The photos were taken at places such as Saltmarsh near Cley, Wells-next-the-Sea and King’s Lynn. You can see from the verbs running through that I was thinking about dynamic processes in wild nature, and the patterns and forms that humans generate through industrial culture.
The full collection of my photos from the residency are here.
Get in touch on bridget.mckenzie@flowassociates.com if you would like to buy a printable or printed version of the book.
These images of the book are low-res screenshots:
The poems are below:
WILD NATURE
Wild nature is imagination itself, infra-red in tooth and claw.
As many ways of seeing as there are forms of being.
Two falcons hover, looking for fresh vole piss in ultraviolet tracks.
How do bryozoans see when they have no eyes, only crowns of tentacles?
Cohabiting with thousands in a high-rise estate we call Hornwrack.
Geese eat by day until the full moon lets them have night feasts.
But if a sea fret blinds them, they flap around screaming, lost for hours.
You can’t imagine some of the stories I could tell you.
You can’t imagine how wild and strange…
Hard to imagine how this can be so quickly engulfed and lost.
How the greying, the darkening,
has become natural, meaning normal.
The coast is a violent habitat.
That’s natural.
But now it’s losing its shit.
HUMAN NATURE
Human nature has twisted in on itself, for itself, but against itself,
faster and faster, sucking wild nature into its wildly spinning vortex.
Human nature is mind-forged and world-forging.
You can’t imagine the difference we’ve made, but the difference
is sourced in imagination.
Spiralling up, up and more up.
Knowledge builds on knowledge, towering to the point of toppling.
Forgetting the wisdom in its rocky roots.
The years of human history have been numbered.
Bottling the water won’t replenish the spring.
Canalising won’t hold the new spring tides.
Too much stock, ranked and left to go rank, too little flow.
In seeking to tighten, things have come loose.
The hills are burning bright, worldwide beacons of blackening and cracking.
The gulfing whales are falling silent.
Too hungry to sing in warming waters.
Communing in vast pods, in grief, prayer or vengeance.
A wet revolution is coming.
Look for the shadows swimming in the dark.
And selections of the photos:
