Four biophysical poems

2012


2010


2009


2009

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A small video-poem concerning agriculture and well-being

I wrote this poem and took the footage roughly a year ago when in Mole Creek (Tasmania) visiting family. I finished editing it yesterday. Enjoy!

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Walking Bare

A video poem written in response to a long shoeless walk, thinking further about technics and technical mediations, mediations such as shoes and the digital footage that preceded, inspired and ultimately simulated this poem.

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The Middle Kingdom of Weeds

I was asked to contribute something to The Middle Kingdom of Weeds Festival, which I was naturally enthusiastic about.

'A place of simple feeding' is a line from Jean-Luc Nancy's book 'The Birth to Presence' (1993), which I gobbled up as the title for this work. I made a simple video as a poem-recipe celebrating autumn's hawthorn (crataegus) berries, using a recipe appropriated from UK forager and BBC presenter, Ray Mears.

In Australia hawthorns are considered pesky weeds, but this passage from Alfred W Crosby's 'Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900' (1986), puts this limited attitude into some perspective:

"The weeds, like skin transplants placed over broad areas of abraded and burned flesh, aided in healing the wounds that the invaders tore in the earth... The colonizing Europeans who cursed their colonising plants were wretched ingrates." p170

Are we all 'in abandonment', as Bossuet spoke of the West, or are we in varying degrees of naturalising our wounds and settling in?

Aboriginal bush foods, cultivated garden produce, some wild meat, and weeds and wild herbs altogether constitute the mainstay of our relocalised diet. Autumn, for us, is a time to ferment and preserve the bounties of the warm months, to use as medicinal foods throughout the winter, as our ancestors once did.

Hawthorn berries have been used continuously in both Eastern and Western medicine traditions for thousands of years. There are around 200 species, although that figure is a little ambiguous. All species, as far as I'm aware, can be used for human consumption, and are especially good for treating heart pathologies such as high blood pressure and hypertension.

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Video-poem as edible weeds field guide

With our recent project in Sydney I think we have achieved what we set out to do in showing how art can itself be a biophysical resource. In this new work, Natural Bitterness, I attempt a similar thing – the poem doubles as video field guide for edible weeds and wild foods abundant in our area this spring.



This poem is dedicated to Alexis Pitsopoulos, our local wild foods expert and cook.

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Plasticity?

I was recently invited to submit a short video poem as part of a collection to be exhibited at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival (17-23 May), curated by Angela Stretch. What, video poetry at a writer's festival? Outrageous! But don't be alarmed, the exhibition doesn't make the official programme.

So, I decided to make a new work with Zeph, which I finished editing today. It will be viewed without sound in Sydney, but I've made it to work with audio as well. Meg helps build the vocals and all together we make another Artist as Family + Peej collective effort. Enjoy!

born free of ideology
we are gullible and trusting.
we learn from our elders
and we pass on the abstractions
to our children.
the depression rate
doubles every ten years.

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Unexpected turn with microbials

WorkmanJones' latest offering.

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Greenwash #4 in Trouble

Glen Dunn recently made a short film about a kiln firing in Southern Tasmania, posted it online and found an unexpected viral enthusiasm for it around the globe. The film’s fusing of the ancient and the modern, the physical and the digital, taps into some of our most basic inclinations to form meaning of the present with things and activities that are common to the past. Things such as clay and wood and fire.

Read on here.

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