Tag Archives: digital mashup

PAY ATTENTION honoring Rachel Carson

Revised design, August 2018

Here is a new perSISTERS design in the #FemalePowerProject for Rachel Carson.

First it is important to understand the times in which Rachel Carson’s attention changed the world. Nature was perceived as a threatening realm in opposition to humans, something that we need to control. Humans were making amazing progress in that regard. The late 1950s was a time of unprecedented prosperity that depended on the exploitation of technologies which had flourished because of wartime investment.

The US and its allies had recently vanquished fascism while creating explosions rivaled only by volcanic forces. It seemed like “man” could do anything: conquer disease with antibiotics; stop plaques with pesticides; create amazing yields with synthetic fertilizers; and…kill billions of living things with one explosion. Not just the explosion—it was the rain of nuclear fallout that spread far and wide afterwards that could wipe out whole populations—something that could not be seen or tasted or touched. This eventually created a profound anxiety. The immense power to control nature first created an optimism about human progress. It took a while for people to realize that this control was also a frightening power that was being deployed heedlessly and without forethought. Rachel Carson was responsible for that reorientation.

Carson had described nature (mostly the shore and the sea) with beautiful language that created a feeling for the delicate and amazing web of interconnected lives and processes. This aesthetic dimension was essential to the power of her message. It could motivate people to cherish the living web that held us up. Not just because humans might perish without it, but also because it is worth saving in itself—it has a value outside of human utility. That is stewardship, a value on which the environmental movement would be founded. Carson saw that human arrogance was outrunning wisdom and she sought to put them in balance. This was accomplished by widening our scope of examination in space and in time. The effects of certain agents might not be evident here and now, but in more distant places and times.

Carson also saw that scientific research was affected by the profit motive of corporations and she called for decisions to made based on more impartial science. One of her biographers, Linda Lear, says in The American Experience
“She is calling for the population to understand that money has a great deal to do with what is done in science. We need to ask who speaks and why. What is done in the name of science and why doesn’t the public have a right to know? These are not just scientific questions. These are questions that a social revolutionary asks.”

Rachel Carson’s goal was to shift the paradigm about humans and nature. She accomplished this not as a scientist, but as a master synthesizer of scientific information and a gifted communicator of science. She also fought hard to convince those in power to heed her alarm. This they did. And she accomplished this before she died of breast cancer at 56.

from Wikipedia:
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.

Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her a U.S. National Book Award and recognition as a gifted writer. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the reissued version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. This sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths.

Late in the 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation, especially some problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was the book Silent Spring (1962), which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Alchemy Scrolls Available in Smaller Size

The Alchemy Scrolls are now available in a smaller size and ready to hang. They are 17 inches wide and 36 inches tall, with wood slats at top and bottom and a chain for hanging. Each one is $200 with a 10% discount if you order all 5 of the Transformation of Earth series. Here is what one of them looks like hanging at Black Lab. Contact the artist if you are interested.

All five are hanging in the studio today.
All five are hanging in the studio today.
Alchemy Scroll: Transformation of Earth, Wrenches & Onions
Alchemy Scroll: Transformation of Earth, Wrenches & Onions

About the Series Pseudomorphs

I’m doing some catch-up in this and the previous post. I have had a lot of practice talking about my work this past year and a half since opening a public studio on the Arts Walk.

Pseudomorph, noun: 1. an irregular or unclassifiable form.

For the Pseudomorphs my goal was to create something outside of categories. This was interesting to me as an exercise in critical thinking and I thought it useful to prompt viewers to pay attention to how their minds work. I have an abiding interest in exploring what is really real, and it is an essential step in this exploration to look at how our minds and cultures impose labels and boundaries around things. We may not be able to experience things outside of these boundaries, but at least we can pay attention to how they work and why they’re there. I used the most basic “Twenty Questions”-like categories: Animal; Plant; Manufactured. I chose to photograph objects that shared some kind of visual characteristic, something I call a visual rhyme. For example, in “Pseudomorphs: Specimen 1” I used objects that had small enclosed blank spaces: horse bridle hardware; bug-bitten leaf; Monarch butterfly wing. Then I created a completely new object by grafting these together using computer software (Photoshop). I realized, though, that once I made more than one, and once I titled the series, then I had in reality created a new category of thing, not a thing outside of categories. The human mind—there it goes again! I love to play with how our minds jump to organization and meaning every time. Verbal nonsense is a center of gravity for me because I love to feel this bending-toward-meaning-but-not-quite-getting-there.

The best thing about having a studio that is often open to the public is I get to see how all kinds of people react to my work without having to go through a lot of exhibition rigmarole. And I could see people reacting to the riddle nature of these pieces, so I can see I am communicating what I set out to do.

Pseudomorphs: Specimen #4
Pseudomorphs: Specimen #4