Kim Williams describes the quirky evolution of the interactive waterway model that featured in the Waterland exhibition.
Cementa 22 featured the wonderful work of Georgie Pollard and Leanne Thompson, allowing us to revisit all the elements of the Capertee Hydrology Project.
It’s funny how time gets away from you. This year I took the big leap to study full-time Honours in Ecology at UNE, and while I am loving every minute of it, my brain is too full of measuring pasture groundcover and landscape function to make space for anything else. And so, despite my best intentions I am yet to publish my farmer stories for ‘Farmers in Flux’.
Imogen Semmler and Judi Earl have cooked up something fabulous: The Grazing Game. How do you maintain a healthy ecosystem in your paddocks, weather drought, withstand market fluctuations and other curve balls, while making a living from keeping livestock? Imogen got Cementa punters to wear their strategy hats last November at the first trial of the Game.
Members of KSCA were invited to contribute to the Hyper Rural: the end of Urbanism? Symposium at Manchester Metropolitan University in November 2017. We prepared this video, which discusses KSCA's approach to art, as well as the 'Sugar vs. the Reef?' project which is led by KSCA members Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams.
Sowing Stories: a workshop on communications and storytelling for ethically engaged creativity.
With Kirsten Bradley from Milkwood Permaculture
Cost: $20 Places are limited, so if you’re keen then book straight away!
BOOK YOUR PLACE HERE
Date: Saturday March 3, 2018.
Time: 10am-1pm
Location: Big Fag Press, Archway 4 Jubilee Park Oval, Chapman Road, Annandale.
Fruit and nibbles will be provided.
About the Workshop:
Are you involved in or thinking about starting up a food co-op, an artist run initiative, a free store, a tool library or an urban agriculture project? Are you working to build a community, a cooperative or a project around the ethical issues and social potentials that drive your curiosity, care and enthusiasm? Then read on!!
On Saturday 3 March Big Fag Press will open its doors for a rare workshop with Kirsten Bradley, co-founder of Milkwood Permaculture. Over the last 11 years Milkwood have shown that it is indeed possible to create ethical, affordable and regenerative food systems from the ground up. While face-to-face teaching is a big part of what they do, they have been able to engage a much larger community because of the compelling way they publicly share their own experiences of risk, experiment and discovery online and through social media.
In this workshop, Kirsten will share how Milkwood approaches communications and storytelling. She will share some of the lessons Milkwood have learnt along the way and engage in a discussion on the implications of marketing ethics-based activity. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop their own ideas and receive expert feedback.
This event represents a collaboration between Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, Cementa Inc., Big Fag Press and Milkwood Permaculture.
This workshop marks the beginning of KSCA’s latest project, ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar…’, exploring the differences and commonalities generated by practitioners from distinct disciplines addressing the common theme of land. Read more about it here
If you want to stay up to date about other events, return to the KSCA website, or write to info@ksca.land to be added to our mailing list.
This event has received support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Yikes, it’s begun! KSCA is now working on an exciting multi-partner project for 2018-2019 in regional NSW, for which we have been awarded funding through the Regional Partnerships scheme of Create NSW.
We are partnering with:
– Cementa Inc. (Kandos)
– The Living Classroom (Bingara)
– Starfish Initatives
– Arts North West (New England NSW)
The project title started out as a joke without a punchline:
what would happen if we brought together artists, farmers and scientists for an open ended collaborative process?
After our successful public forum Futurelands2 in Kandos in November 2016, we decided to connect to Bingara, our “sister city” in rural NSW. Bingara is home to The Living Classroom (TLC), a community run space which hosts workshops and incubates innovation in regenerative agriculture (pictured above). Importantly, TLC has 26 beds, a workshop and seminar space, and over 150 hectares of land set aside for agricultural experimentation. An exciting focus of this experimentation is carbon sequestration in soil – for which they now have a dedicated site called The Carbon Farm.
The resources of the TLC led us to imagine what it would be like to run an “artist-in-residency” style program there, expanded to include not just artists but also farmers and scientists.
What might farmers and scientists come up with if they start behaving like artists? And how might artists’ practices expand when faced with the deep knowledge of farmers and scientists?
That’s what we’re trying to find out.
This project also taps into a set of relationships already developing in Kandos. Thus, several of our collaborative residencies with be hosted by farmers and local community members in the mid-west of NSW. The outcomes of all of this blue-sky experimentation will be presented at a public forum at the beautifully restored Roxy Theatre in Bingara, and as an integral part of the Cementa 19 festival in Kandos.
We will launch the project in style on Saturday May 5, 2018 in Bingara, when the North West Theatre Company will present ‘An artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar’ as a theatrical performance! The play will be accompanied by a bountiful feast of locally foraged and organic produce, and an informal discussion with some of our artists and collaborators. All in the magical setting of Bingara’s Roxy Theatre (built in 1936 and restored to its former glory in 2011). It’s going to be a ripper evening – come back to this page, follow KSCA on facebook, or sign up to the newsletter (bottom of this page) for updates.
Revisit the Futurelands2 talks and events that took place in and around Kandos on 12 – 13 November, 2016. Huge thanks to Justin Hewitson for making these! You can also view these videos at the KSCA youtube channel.
Every couple months, the KSCA gang come together for a sleepover at Ian Milliss’ house. Because we live across the state and communicate most often via electronic media, these sleepovers are a precious time for us to get together in veritable reality and remind each other that we are all still embodied beings and that for the most part we like each other. It also gives us an opportunity to look into the bellybuttons we all have on those bodies.
It was another great sleepover event with a lot of really rich conversation and discussion and some pretty tasty pizza and a couple drops of not bad wine to boot.
Lucas Ihlein talks about infrastructure within a vanitas tableaux.
Gilbert Grace presented on The Sydney Green Ring, his long term ambitious proposal to connect 34 kilometers of green space and bicycle paths to create a single continuous, safe and beautiful bicycle path describing a circle through 13 council areas across Sydney.
If that sounds impossible, the good news is that 95% of the infrastructure is already in place and the work necessary would need to be in getting councils to cooperate in connecting and signposting the infrastructure already in place. This promotes the project into the realm of almost impossible, which is where KSCA seems to find itself at home.
We discussed a number of strategies about how we might begin the mammoth task of raising awareness and initiating momentum that might eventually build into something of the scale necessary to achieve such an ambitious undertaking. There were a number of suggestions that all held to the theme of ‘start small stupid’ – events and projects that might be achievable at strategic points along the green ring, in cooperation with one or two of the more ‘friendly’ councils and then use these to accrue support and generate discussion with councils and other levels of government etc.
There was also some discussion around how we might be able to gain access to certain movers and decision makers that are working toward a more unified approach to Sydney’s sprawling and disconnected infrastructure.
The Green Ring 2017, dimensions: 34 kilometers. medium: liveable infrastructure. Artist Statement: Eat your heart out Christo
Behind or even in front of this discussion was another quite exciting conversation around KSCA adopting an infrastructure policy and advocating for placing an ‘artist’s’ perspective into infrastructure policy production. And you thought The Green Ring was ambitious. Its an exciting idea for a bunch of artists trying to escape the white cube and one that was much encouraged by the thorough and concise policy document that Gilbert had produced in preparation for our meeting. If you haven’t read the document yet, I’ve attached it for your policy document delectation.
Infrastructure Proposition brief
After that was some sleeping in preparation for the next day.
First on the agenda for the 2nd day was a mission statement for KSCA discussed over breakfast. We came up with a lot of words that seemed to apply but had less success in putting them together. There seemed to be two main concerns.
The first was the role or place that land held in relation to the overall scope of KSCA. To date, all of our activity has been land-centric and yet there is nothing inherently land dependent about the idea of cultural adaptation. KSCA’s relationship to land, I believe, arises from the praxis lead nature of the school – that we start with doing stuff and the thinking and learning evolves from there. For a number of reasons, this praxis has been tied exclusively to land and thus land has dominated our concern.
This is not a practical problem, if you consider that KSCA is determined by the context or circumstances in which it operates. It has no abstract essential identity, but morphs according to circumstances and in part at least can be said to be whatever it practices. You can see why this is an issue for a thing like devising a mission statement that is meant to encapsulate the total describable activity of an organisation. How do we hold onto the centrality that land has played in the material history of the group’s formation without reducing the scope of our future activity to the terms of this history? Cultural adaptation, according to our definition, should be capable of including any activity in which culture is changed.
The second problematic revolves around that word ‘Art’, and to a lesser degree the word ‘artist’. KSCA was established as a vehicle for exploring the idea of art as cultural change and challenging the conventional notion that this is an activity that is somehow exclusive to the rarified preserves of high culture. On the contrary, it is our view that cultural change takes place outside of these arenas, in the world or worlds in which culture is practiced. It is our endeavour to discover modes and practices through which we might participate and contribute to those points of every day cultural change. It is the challenge to the conventional definition of Art through a non-art conception of practice that has in part drawn us together.
How then do we treat Art in our mission statement? Do we enshrine it in the very heart of the project or do we exile it? The question is whether, in this mode, are we still making art, or are we just making life? At stake, amongst other things, is the capacity for our work to eventually be co-opted back into the art world we are attempting to leave behind. On the other side, we risk loosing the specific conception of our activity, and deny the material fact that it has emerged and is emerging out of art in a gesture that would dissolve the tension this very problematic describes. It seems to me that what is compelling about KSCA relies on the distortion of the Art concept to include a content that has hitherto been alien or other to it. The dream, I suppose, is that our action might draw the former out of its white walled cul de sac into the world. The risk is that it might withdraw our activity back into the cul de sac without significant result.
I will not argue for a decision on either of these two points here, but only want to note that it is the point of decision that resolved an existing differential tension into an irreconcilable polarity. Again, there is nothing in practice that insists we resolve these contradictions and in fact, they seem to define if not compel what we do. It is only when we come to the point of decision that these differences resolve themselves into polarities and we enter the either/or of binary thinking.
If I reflect on the broader ‘soft structure’ that KSCA has taken on, I believe I could argue that making such decisions has been something we have assiduously avoided throughout. I also acknowledge that there are obvious consequences to our agnostic approach that have yet to unfold – and that the failure to make decisions can be as dire a decision as making bad decisions. But no need to decide on that now.
It was also acknowledged that KSCA is a school and that at the heart of what we are doing is learning. It was also acknowledged that as a whole, we were all more interested in being students than teachers or professors (some of us already suffering this fate).
Here is the time someone said something funny
For our final foray, we gathered in the hunting lodge for a brisk 2 hours of brainstorming and consultation led by Sarah Breen Lovett and David Kroll from Sydney University School of Architecture. The subject is another pipe dream project – a purpose built facility to house artist residencies and facilitate community engaged creativity in Kandos. To make things more difficult, we decided to make the building project artist-led.
To my surprise, the architects were actually excited by the prospect of working with artists to design and build the facility. I tried to explain how artists pride themselves on their capacity to generate unreasonable objects but this didn’t seem to discourage them.
more serious now
So I don’t have to explain everything we talked about, here is a picture.
I also learned that Lucas Ihlein is an excellant draftsman. I didn’t know. I’m not sure why but I thought his sketches of the tupperware and serving ware were somehow important documents of our adventure.
Gilbert Grace writes:
As a painter, with an interest in the sustainable use of materials and resources, I see common threads linking traditional painting methods, agriculture, housing, and food production.
The painting ‘supports’ – canvas, timber and the natural size used to prime and glue the them together, are sourced from the land. Canvas is the word the Dutch gave to hemp based cloth, and comes from the Dutch pronunciation of cannabis, long before the introduction of cotton ‘duck’ from the Dutch ‘doek’. Both are types of canvas that have origins as sail cloth, and were to the age of sail what oil was to the 20th century internal combustion engine. The HMS Challenger, seen in this painting by William Frederick Mitchell (circa 1880, wikipedia commons), had hemp sails. The history of sail extends to early trading and colonising efforts. Vikings used hemp as a sail cloth for light winds. More robust sails made of wool and sized with animal glue were developed to tolerate gusting winds, as they were more elastic and resilient to gales. Animal hides, like seal and some land animals, were the basis of rigging because they were so resilient to water, salt and ice.
Gilbert Grace at Cementa 17, displaying hemp-based textiles made by weaver Kelly Leonard.
The ‘rabbit skin glue’ use to seal, prime and keep the painting canvas taut, is obtained by boiling down animal hides and bones.
Timber is a valuable natural resource that must be grown and harvested with skill and care, and reused appropriately. Wasted timber is a waste of imagination. The sources of hemp for sail cloth have also been the source of timber for hulls, decking, masts and spars.
Paints are composed of natural products more commonly thought of as food. Egg tempera uses egg whites proving a fast drying, light, long lasting paint film. Casein paint come from mixing pigments with cows’ milk. Pigments are comprised of raw, cooked and burnt earths, powdered metal and their oxides, semi-precious gems stones, naturally occurring or with minimal preparation including the use of heat. Oils for painting came from edible seed crops, hemp, sunflower, linseed, that oxidise and form a hard film when exposed to air. Pigments become paint when ground to a fine paste with pestle and mortar and combined with an oil medium. The heat treatment of the oil prior to mixing starts the process of polymerisation, rapidly increasing ‘drying’ time. The addition of siccatives reduces the drying time of oils even further.
The argument for acrylics being superior to oils as a painting medium is countered by the persistence of plastics in the environment: our blindness to petroleum based plastic is, in fact, a triumph of marketing. Natural fabrics and hides have also been displaced by synthetic petrochemical “plastics” for sail and boating use.
The great floating garbage patches of the Southern and Northern Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans are composed of plastics pollution, either as cast aside drift nets or aggregated waste, killing sea life and water birds. This is due to the fact that sustainable products like hemp have been written out of history and we have been seduced into accepting the widespread use of petrochemical products with their toxic by-products and, toxic social and political impacts. Thus our manufactured reliance on petrochemicals in many of our current sailing, building and food production processes, as well as many forms of art, forces us to recognise that if we are to eliminate these products we have to acknowledge that we are confronting serious questions of culture.
On a nippy weekend in August, KSCA hosted a weekend gathering in beautiful rugged country outside of Rylstone, to share ideas about rural futures, art and sustainability, and rural/urban interaction. Here are Laura’s recollections.
There were 17 of us, travelling from as far north as Inverell as far south as Albury (I’ve listed those who participated at the end of this post). Along with these broad themes, we wanted to talk about how we can further the collaborative relationship that is emerging between KSCA, Starfish Initiatives and The Living Classroom (and their friends), and between two regional towns: Kandos and Bingara. We were very ably and generously assisted in this by Tirriania Sahood and David Pointon who acted as facilitators over the weekend. Beyond these strategic intentions, we also wanted to simply spend time together without the pressure of a deadline or an outcome – essential for groups who are so dispersed geographically.
The question of culture was central, whether we were talking about regenerative farming, micro-enterprises in small towns or reimagining rural life through artistic practice. What forms can ‘cultural adaptation’ take in these different contexts? We all know that the obstacles to change are not just the usual political things that get us all fired up, but the “cultural imaginaries” that shape public thinking. It’s this that gets the artists among us excited about working outside the art-world, where we can learn from, and work collaboratively with people who are being creative within the cultures of agriculture, industry, governance and the like.
All of us at Rylstone’s famous Yum-Cha and Tea House. Thanks to Emma Wisser for a great photo!
As a group, we discovered that we all had an interest in modelling, though we had different ways of naming that activity. From The Living Classroom’s new Carbon Farm, to The Hemp Initiative, to small town renewable energy initiatives supported by Starfish Initiatives, we all see the value in illustrating, trialling, and doing proof-of-concept exercises. As artists like Ian Milliss have shown again and again, working with an economy of means to express big, speculative ideas keeps things playful and low risk. The Carbon Farm is a project intent on modelling forms of sustainable agriculture, so farmers can learn and observe without being burdened by the heavy costs of overhauling their farm on their own.
We also had useful conversations about how collectives like KSCA or Starfish Initiatives are connected to place. I ponder this quite a bit. Some of KSCA’s members are local to Kandos, but some of us aren’t. In the town itself, some people are interested in what we’re doing, some hostile, some don’t care, and many don’t know KSCA exists. From the small community regeneration work Bob Neville has done for 20 years, to the Cementa Festival, to farmer Glenn Morris’ climate change activismwhich bemuses his neighbours – out-of-the-ordinary activities always trigger such a mix of responses in small communities. Adam Blakester very sagely reminded us that mass extinction events and refugee movements are just two indications that this is an era of massive, global disruption – it’s just not being experienced evenly in all parts of the world. Carrying such thoughts while also responding to the predicament of a small town feels, for me, like a kind of dizzying mental table-tennis match between macro- and micro- lenses for looking at the world. Rather than simply contemplating and debating those disorienting meta-concerns and leaving them up in the ether, our activities bring those issues “to ground” in a particular place and community. Social frictions are unavoidable. A key question that arises, then, is can we work creatively with the messiness that is produced?
With that in mind, we also addressed the question of how rural communities can support each other. Kandos and Bingara are just two of many hundreds of towns in Australia (and many thousands in the world) that are vulnerable due to declining industries, scarce employment, the reduced viability of family farms, poor infrastructure and depopulation. But their size, affordability and land-based resources also means there are many latent possibilities for cultural and economic reinvention. All of us are keen to find out how grassroots projects in these locations can draw sustenance from each other, and how a sense of solidarity that bridges vast distances can be fostered. As we discussed how to build such bridges – both face-to-face and virtual – Adam used the apt metaphor of ‘constellations’ to describe his commitment to the idea of a dispersed, networked movement for sustainable change that is driven by rural communities.
The project ‘an artist, a farmer and a scientist walk into a bar…’ is a chance to explore all of this, and we’re crossing fingers we can make it happen in 2018/2019.
This project’s title derives from one of Alex Wisser’s late-night pontifications on how to turn the conflicts currently afoot in the world of agriculture into an art project. Serendipitously, when I got home after the weekend, I came across something very similar in an old book that Glenn Morris gave me called ‘Out of the Earth’, by Louis Bromfield (published in 1951). Bromfield was a playwright, novelist, conservationist and pioneer of sustainable agriculture, and founder of Malabar Farm in Ohio:
“‘Within every true artist or farmer or scientist there is a spark, as precious as that first tiny spark which life itself began, that is compounded of imagination and speculation, which are the handmaidens of creation. There is as well the immensely important faculty of observation…
In the long history of mankind, the tiniest observation or speculation of the most humble men (and all really great men humble in the face of Nature) has sometimes led to vast and dynamic discoveries of the utmost importance to man. Many of the greatest contributions to agriculture in our time have not come from the billion-dollar Department of agriculture nor from the countless colleges of aquaculture but from a county agent or a farmer who had the power to observe, the imagination to speculate and the logic to deduce a process from which vast benefits have developed.’”
Earnest 1950s prose aside, this passage says a lot to me about the guiding ideas of our weekend.
Catching last light at Kerry’s and Dom’s in the Capertee.
P.S. A KSCA gathering would feel incomplete without a visit to someone’s property. On this occasion, we were lucky enough to be welcomed by Dom and Kerry at their place in the breathtaking Capertee Valley. We took a look at the regenerative tree-planting work they’ve done around the place, and their native nursery. This nursery provides seedlings to the Regent Honey Eater project, which over many years has been able to re-establish habitats for the endangered Honey Eater in the region. We know you don’t get online very much Dom and Kerry, but thanks a million!
Who attended:
Adam Blakester (Starfish Initiatives)
Pete Arkins (Starfish Initiatives)
Bob Neville (Starfish/Community Regeneration)
Christine McMillan (KSCA/Cementa)
Georgie Pollard (KSCA)
Belinda Innes (Cementa)
Alex Wisser (KSCA/Cementa)
Victoria Walker (environmental systems community collaborator and educator)
Glenn Morris (FigTree Organic Farms)
Ian Milliss (KSCA)
Lucas Ihlein (KSCA)
Eloise Lindeback (KSCA)
Gilbert Grace (KSCA)
Rick Hutton (The Living Classroom, Bingara)
Garry McDouall (The Carbon Farm/The Living Classroom, Bingara)
Tirrania Surhood (InCollaboration)
With especial thanks to Tirrania, David and Adam for giving so much time and energy to the organisation of the weekend. This gathering was supported by the University of Sydney, through an Industry Engagement Fund seed grant awarded to Laura Fisher.
So we had a long drive getting to the living classroom. It was a lot of fun, driving along narrow country roads that wound through the endless valley. It was a little bit of a shock, finding myself in the car with Laura and the first hour of the so was composed of an almost frenetic conversation about everything and anything we had been thinking about or doing for the last several months. After a while though we relaxed and took in the country we travelled in. It was especially luxurious for me who usually travels alone and in a hurry across the regions and never stops for photographs of all the odd things that pop out of the bush at you as you pass. We stopped along the way, starting with the Great Wall of Slag that greets every traveler entering the Hunter Valley from the south. It seems an almost intentional monument to our destructive relationship to the environment. If you can get past the feeling of despair it projects, the thing has a formal beauty that I cannot deny. So I snapped a photo and passed by.
Mountains of Slag frame farmland in the Hunter Valley. photo Alex Wisser
We arrived after dark and settled in. Gary met us not long after and dragged us out to the Imperial Pub for a drink and a feed. Laura was able to secure a decent salad and Gary and I partook of the perennial pub steak. A couple beers to wash the road out of my muscles and had a lovely conversation with Gary about class divisions in small towns, art and farming and anything else that occurred to us. It was good to settle in to this informal social mode, to speak of things we shared concern for, outside of the business-like negotiations of a project. It is customary to neglect these small social engagements, ancillary to the main business at hand, but for me, this is where I do my best work, usually by talking too much and too loudly. It was nice to bring the relationship to the level of a relationship.
Day 2
Rick Hutton, Garry McDougal and Laura Fisher at the dreaded white board. photo Alex Wisser
The morning was much more business-like. There were white boards and discussions about budgets. It reminded me how important it was to do things like this, traveling 8 hours for a day and half of talking face to face to people before driving another 8 hours home. The discussions were frank and friendly, and by the end I felt we were a more coherent whole.
Rick Hutton, Laura Fisher, and Garry McDougal tour The Living Classroom. photo Alex Wisser
The project had originated mostly on the KSCA side, with the selection of artists and participants and the development of individual artwork ideas. The speed with which Rick and Gary were able to inhabit the space this initial work opened for them was impressive. They filled this space with the interests and concerns that belonged to their own project as well as bringing new resources and potentials to the table. The result at the end was a sense that we had overcome that awkward first stage of a partnership in which two parties stand in contrast to one another, each addressing an unknown entity across the palpable distance that separates them. It was impressive how they were able to join into the design of a thing already underway and assume a pace with it, naturalising their contribution. In the end it felt like there was one team and one project.
Garry McDougal, Rick Hutton and Alex discuss his proposal to dig a hole as a permanent artwork at the living classroom. Alex is standing in a hole dug a hundred years ago by prospectors testing for gold. We thought it might be a perfect location, given that the work has already been started for us. photo Laura Fisher
After that Laura and I piled into the car and drove out to Tingha to meet with Caroline Downer, Regional Arts Officer (RADO) for Arts North West and Greg Livermore of the Anaiwan land council. Tingha is a charmer, one of those contracting townships that despite the closed shops still radiate a cheerfulness that you cannot resist.
The Tingha mural. photo Alex Wisser
The Tingha mural, continued. photo Alex Wisser
The fact that a brightly painted mural of the area stretched across nearly two blocks of the Main Street didn’t hurt the impression.
The original grocery store/emporium is now a museum. photo Alex Wisser
And then there was this place
Every small town needs a folly. photo Alex Wisser
Laura and I recently took a road trip to Bingara to visit our partners at The Living Classroom and other local folk to establish connection and build relationships as a means of developing the latest KSCA project “An Artist a Farmer and a Scientist walk into the bar…”.
Going places with apples. photo Alex Wisser.
As the title implies, the project will bring artists, farmers and scientists together to work on a series of projects that explore issues of sustainability and the challenges faced by farmers adapting to regenerative farming methods in NSW. The idea came out of the recognition that there was a lack of communication between farmers and scientists on this issue, verging at times on distrust and hostility. Perhaps, we thought, artists might be able to broker a more productive relationship.
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere. photo Alex Wisser
The three terms of the project title very neatly triangulate, each sharing similarities and points of difference with the other two. The scientist, for instance, participates in a level of abstraction as does the artist, but differs on the point of practicality – a quality for which art is not significantly known. The farmer, on the other hand, while not given as much to abstraction, is nothing if not a pragmatist. I realise that this is a highly simplified analysis, and would not hold up against the variety that exists within each of these fields, but I make it nonetheless to indicate that these three figures think about the world in very different ways, but with similarities or points of overlap. This project, for me, offers an opportunity to explore whether artists, for instance, can contribute to a conversation between the scientist and the farmer via a point of detachment from both of their perspectives. Is it not possible to look at our differences as that point of communication from which we can diversify ideas, instead of a point of irreconcilable conflict between two competing systems of thought and observation?
There is a story here, but we’ll never hear it. photo Alex Wisser
I am not a painter, but I understand quite intimately the feeling a painter must have before a newly stretched blank canvas. This blank field of potential stretching out in all directions, containing an infinite field of possible color, form and content is intimidating in its limitlessness. It faces the artist as a blank slate waiting to receive its future, finite, final material form. When it is finished, the produced thing will have a singular irrevocable being. This project has something of this aspect to me, here at its beginning. It is not as neat as the example of a canvas, with its image of the tabula rasa conveniently denying all the antecedent histories and contexts that surround both it and the artist. The effect though is the same. I survey a vast field of unknowing. It might as well be blank, for all that I know of scientists or farmers, the political structures and cultures that they separately negotiate, much less the vast forces that are engaged when the worlds that they inhabit undergo change. I know even less how they will respond when brought together and asked to engage in the uncouth act of making art. Unknown are the names and the faces of the people I will meet, the sounds of their voices and the particularities of their personalities. It feels like I am on the verge of making art.
Alex Wisser 14/9/17
What does a hat say about a human? During our New England road trip Eloise Lindebach saw the whimsy in our various head-coverings, and made this group portrait of KSCA members and some of the lovely people who showed us around.
