Culturing Sustainability: a cookbook for artists and educators

[Caffyn Kelley]

Culturing Sustainability: a cookbook for artists and educators

Artists and educators around the world are inventing new models for art, inquiry and learning community that resist hegemonic knowledge and global economic pressures. Expanding the space of the possible, “creating conditions for the emergence of the as-yet unimagined….” (Davis), they are culturing sustainability. This text aims to explore some of the methods, motives and consequences of these innovative practices while opening space for further dialogue.

This text is a living document, and I hope you will correct, add, and argue with me here so that we can co-create a much better text together. I know that the questions I am interested in exploring cannot be adequately addressed by an individual. The resources we need for culturing sustainability, and the texts full of useful instructions for creative projects I hope we will develop in a network of engaged artists and educators, can only be created through collaboration.

This text is drawn from and inspired by the dialogue at the Engaged Art Network and the Islands Institute. I have included a theoretical exploration of the areas I find important to the project of culturing sustainability, and well as a description of the artists whose work informs my own practice, and some of the approaches I have developed over the years in my work as an artist and educator.

In the spirit of open-source culture, I have included images from many artists’ work and quoted liberally from your writings – properly accredited and linked back to you wherever possible. Check it out and let me know of any objections, corrections and additions! If your work isn’t included, and you would like it to be, please tell me that too.

To open the 235-page book (PDF file 12 MB - be patient, it takes a while): CLICK HERE You are welcome to download, save, share...

[Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet]

What a wonderful work! It will take me a while to get through it, but I will. in a few minutes I found in it so many similar ground, references and quotes to my own search. And thank you for including our last work-in-progress "The Future is on the Table". Gwylene Gallimard

[Helen Dixon]

Dear All,

Sorry I haven´t been too active in this site. The book sounds like its right up my street! Will try to write back with my thoughts and things about my practice.
Keep up the good work!

Love, Helen

[Lisa Lipsett]

Wow,
On first glance your book not only looks beautiful it is very rich. Its very exciting. I intend to read more thoroughly in the next short while and will post any ideas... I also want to pass it along to some of my colleagues at the Transformative Learning centre at OISE/UT -they will drink it up!!

All the best
Lisa

[Phyllis Reeve]

Taking some quiet morning time to read the cookbook, I remembered Dylan Thomas' poem - "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower", which I have posted at the Book Club.

[Phyllis Reeve]

Taking Tea with Monsters - page 48.
Compare the Monster Issue (07) of Geez Magazine http://www.geezmagazine.org/issue07

[Caffyn Kelley]

Thanks Phyllis - how wonderful and mysterious, as I had in mind that same poem, not even 1/2 remembered, several times as I was writing...

[Phyllis Reeve]

A rich resource. A journey, never-ending, with signposts, with opportunities for taking sideroads and wandering in circles or spirals.
Or, as you claim,a cookbook - forever offering new recipes according to the needs and moods of the day.
At the end, which is really a beginning, I found myself excited all over again by the vitality of our networks.
To those who can't just now read right through, I suggest skipping about, and it's definitely okay to look at the last chapter - this isn't a Harry Potter novel, even if it is magic.

[Lisa Lipsett]

Hi Caffyn,

I'm really enjoying my read through of the
cookbook and thought I'd share a few impressions.

I find your book to be both thoughtful and
visually provocative. There is a fresh flair that
I find myself drinking in. Its beautiful and
rich.

I love the metaphor of "braiding" that you use
early on.

In particular I resonate with David Abram,
Naess, Bragg and their understandings of the
ecological self and our abilitiy to dissolve
into/resonate with the more-than-human world. I
see artmaking as the bridge between humans and
nature, between masc/fem and between our
identities and community/natural relationships.

I've combed through the first 40 pages or so and
find I'm getting bogged in the subject/object
wrangle. Maybe we're coming from different
theoretical positions. I'm not sure. Anyways
here's my unsolicited two cents for what its
worth.

Thomas Berry says that the universe is a communion
of differentiated subjects not a collection of
objects, Quantum Physics tells us that everything
has both a particle (object) and wave (subject)
aspect, so it can be helpful to talk about rebalancing
aspects like masc/fem and mind/body. Or
understanding that what we can know from studying
a jar of water (object)differs from what is known
by swimming in it (subject). Both are water. On pg
41 when you introduce the concept and chart on the
vector of abjection are you talking about the
place where object dissolves into the subject?
Like an ecotone, or liminal space betwixt and
between? Are you talking about the creative life
force that embues all as in Carol Bigwoord's piece
"earth muse" where she talks about the concealed
and uncealed aspects being joined by love. It
gets muddy for me when I look at the chart and see
male on the same side as life and female in the
column with death. I'm not sure its helpful to
split things up without being really clear about
how you're getting to that. In otherwards quantum
physics shows us that yes the buddhists are right-
there is no me and yet I have my own genetic code
that makes me an unique individual. Being both
subjectively connected and having a sense of
separate subjective experience are real. As is the
ability to identify an unique particle aspect in
all life and to understand communial relationship
between all things. One is embedded in the other
like a mobius strip cycling from inward to outward
seamlessly (I've been painting a large number of
these lately, that and nests- another way of
looking at things). Western civilization's bane
has been both a distortion of both aspects and an
imbalance between them. Every civilization
struggles to get the balance right, its an
evolving pocess that is maybe connected to
consciousness....

So I'm thinking that the subject/object piece
could be made clearer for people like me who are
working from an ecological perspective in an
attempt to understand the role of artmaking in
personal and community transformation.

I also wonder if its truly the case that this work
can only be done in community. I think there is an
incredible richness to the collection of work you
share. It is also the case that the work of
personal transformation through ecological
art-making is crucial to the human rebalancing
that is needed. As an artist/educator who is
asking people to plumb the depths of their own
ecological selves in order to realize all the
benefits you describe on pg 32 (Bragg) I often
feel left out of the community based ecological
art circle. Human nature has its own ecosystemic
dynamics that follow all the same laws as a
watershed or volcano. When people have a way to
access their own imagery (eg. through artmaking)
then the sense of separateness from nature and
natural process really begins to dissolve.

I'll keep reading and maybe things will come
clearer soon. Thanks for sharing this work. Its
very inspiring.

All the best
Lisa

[Caffyn Kelley]

Yes Lisa! and thank you, this is rich feedback and speaks to my dream of arguing and co-creating this cookbook together. I will look again at the vector of abjection (by which I mean the process through which the subject casts out/refuses an object-identity, and assumes the "I am what I am and that's all what I am" form of subjectivity that separates us from all that is other). I do agree that the subject-object wrangle is way too much of a stopping-place for me! I want to encourage everyone to skip to Part 3! As for your point about "the work of personal transformation through ecological art-making" rather than just work in community - I so agree that this is a vital piece for all of us, even when our primary practice is in community. Can you offer any recipes from your practice as artist and/or educator that help nourish and sustain the work of personal transformation, connections with nature and natural processes?

[Phyllis Reeve]

Well, no, Caffyn. Don't encourge us all to skip the Object/ Subject complication section. Or - if we want to rush past it to see what comes next, we must return for a closer look, because it is essential (or existential?).
A Self/subject which is emerging, becoming is bound to bump into objects which are really Other Subjects also emerging and becoming and bumping into objects ...
And even if what I bump into is a rock or a table or a sleeping cat, well there it is, in the world, in "my" world, and there I am in its world.
I had an interesting encounter yesterday with a small green frog who had got into my watering can, and the two of us had to figure out how s/he might move from there to the ground. I didn't want to pick him/her up - why not? Anyway, somehow the move was made, and we both went on about our gardening.
Caffyn's Vector of Abjection does rather come upon one rather grimly, and I think could benefit from some introduction and elaboration. On second reading, I decided to defy the dividing lines and draw connecting lines, making everything untidy and even more complicated. Then I fiddled around with "deracinated" and "racialized" and added "radical" - all words about "roots" - which carried me fairly smoothly along to the theme of "interrogating whiteness", though I don't want to lose track of the tree roots along the way (not even the tree roots which get into the septic field, or which are invaded by the septic field, depending on whether the point of view is mine or the tree's).
It is obvious that I have done more than enough "thinking" for this session. I am certainly in no state to take on Jung tonight.

[Tancha Dirickson]

The site specific installation "The Gift" dec 2004, alongside Hwy 97, by Tancha Dirickson was a product community engagement, financial support and collaboration by the citizens of Summerland. The artistic aim of the piece was to honor our agriculture land and products as well as, to alert all of the need to preserve our rural way of living. The piece reveived several relevant media and public exposure on the Okanagan Valley. The tag on the huge gift read simply " From All Of Us To All of You".

[Tancha Dirickson]

Sorry all, I just reply downloading a piece of art we assembled here on the OK valley, I am not familiar with this blog culture and still learning. The cookbook is really amazing, and I will certainly would like to contribute to it. Now, I understand better that I must comment about all the great things you all are talking about! I am so happy to have discover you all and this site-blog. It is all about what I ponder, read, talk and create! This is my first blog that I ever participate, so please, you all bear with me. Thank you.