exhibited at:

• Red Hook Open Studios 2023, Brooklyn Artists Waterfront Coalition, Red Hook Brooklyn

• Urban Soils Symposium 2023, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Gallery, Governor’s Island, NY

project description:

These field guides are a series of works created to facilitate unknowing. While traditional field guides are designed to assist in identification of organisms and elements in their natural environment, Drawing on the Senses (DOTS) Field Guides invite you into a process of defamiliarization. A DOTS Field Guide can be a set of written prompts, a process, a path, a person, a series of artworks — it is an open-ended form guided by sensation.

HISTORY

The concept of nature as separate from and external to humans cohered in the Enlightenment, and with it came the idea that humans (more specifically Man, which in the Enlightenment referred to white European men of the wealthy, educated classes)could be objective observers of nature. Objective truth, obtained through the carefully reasoned and detached study of the natural world, was the assumed purview of Man and proof of his dominance. Two centuries after the Enlightenment, we are living in another Age of Man, the Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene is used to describe this geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence over all of earth’s ecosystems. Many have pointed out the failings of this word to adequately account for the unevenness of “Man’s” influence: the distribution of power and consequences amongst humankind is far from homogenous and we are not “all in this together.” The Anthropocene is useful, however, as a lens that simultaneously shows us what humanity’s presumed exemption from and sovereignty over nature can yield, while also showing us that humanity does not have it all under control. 

METHODOLOGY

Defamiliarization is a methodology for troubling the distance, for coming into relation with our environment, which includes what we name as natural, as human-built, and all that complicates any clear distinction between the two. It is the promiscuous muddying of classifications. Defamiliarization is the deterritorialization of the ordered world of sense, seeking out ruptures in routinized perception, that we might come into contact with to other forms of sensing, navigating, and perceiving the world. These field guides do not purport to offer a means of return or reconnection with a pure state of nature nor do they offer a thesis for living in harmonious relations with the environment. Neither do these guides intend nor expect to replace the horror of environmental destruction with the performance of hope. The DOTS field guides invite you to trade ordered taxonomies for taxonomies of strangeness, where senses are rearranged and kinships redrawn, that we might learn to live with, rather than live apart from this wild, unknowable world we all share.

exercise 1:

Make a drawing of the stump from the sensory perspective of someone in the stump’s ecosystem. How might a beetle record its daily traversals above, around, or across the remains of the tree? How might the roots of the grasses surrounding the stump be communicating with the tree root mycelium under the ground? What senses might these trunk dwellers, neighbors and visitors use to interact with the stump? Experiment with ways to draw the trunk through the eyes, ears, feet, sensilla or mechanoreceptors of someone in this trunk’s community.  

exercise 2:

Find a place to explore the soil. You don’t have to dig it up or even see it, you can just stand there, or sit, and feel it. Imagine yourself with roots reaching down into the earth. Now imagine your rooted form has decomposed and is traveling through the soil as mineral. How far back through time can you travel? When you’ve gone as far as you can, down to the bedrock or further, start making your return through the hot and cold layers of earth, through glacial till and outwash,through dredge and fill materials, through the leaded soil and turf above. What is carried back into your body from those soils? Can you taste the sediment of deep time on your tongue?

Close your eyes and make a drawing of that soil in your body. Keeping your eyes closed, scan through your body and let your hands make whatever marks they want to make as you explore this dark terrain. What secrets does it hold? What grows from that soil?

exercise 3:

Find a place where you can be still, perhaps on the bench in front of the record shop if you can find a spot, and write or draw all of the sounds you sense. Listen with your whole body, with your bones and your nervous system.

Now imagine the noisy street disappearing under a great wave. 18,000 years ago, the record shop would have been under a glacial lake, and climate change predictions say it may be underwater again in 2050. Drop down below the surface. Feel the vibrations, the sound waves passing through your head. You can remove your headphones now, plug your ears with your fingers, and just swim through the tidal creeks that still flow under the surface of the asphalt, concrete and cobblestone streets, carrying you back to the marshy shore, into the Buttermilk Channel, around the bay. Swim backwards and forwards in time, swim through glacial melts and ice age nematodes. Swim through the estuary waters where the beginning and end of the world mix. Sing, listen, breathe when you need to, and keep swimming.

These exercises are offered as prompts for you to make your own field guide.

If you would like to share your reflections and work, you can upload images, text, audio, and video files to:

Red Hook Field Guide Participant Works

Thank you:

The handmade paper works were created with Red Hook Soil, and recycled paper generously donated by NY Printing and Graphics on 381 Van Brunt St 11AR 

Sources:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/56225

https://www.nyc.gov/assets/oer/downloads/pdf/red-hook-brooklyn.pdf

https://www.bklynlibrary.org/blog/2019/09/10/not-so-brief-history-red

https://www.redhookconservancy.org/about-red-hook

https://redhookwaterstories.org/

https://www.sutori.com/en/story/erie-basin-red-hook--TTb8H8L6xoMqMoxPKoesJ8Ww

https://www.hudsonriver.org/article/december-2020-ames-seminar

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0833/ML083390034.pdf

https://scienceandnonduality.com/article/becoming-earth/

https://catmap.co/

https://www.consumerreports.org/corporate-accountability/amazon-warehouses-are-straining-a-brooklyn-neighborhood-a2966247023/

https://urbansoils.org/blog-pedosphere/soils-and-the-city

https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/geology