Category: Reflections
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A minute for Martha
I have been drawing Martha since 2018. I have drawn her more than 100 times, mostly in a sketch book dedicated to her, which I started as an exercise in bearing witness to an extinct species. During the early, lockdown phase of Covid-19, the Martha sketchbook became a significant object in my life. Notes about…
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Stitching with Regent Honeyeaters
When we began this project in 2018, our primary intent for it was to be a creative practice collaboration. The number of talks and publications from the project since then might suggest that no longer to be the case. Yet in the background we both continue to make creative works in response to what we…
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Birds of Mallacoota by Nick Ritar
Following the New Year’s Eve bushfire that forced most of Mallacoota’s residents on its beach, Nick Ritar of Milkwood, a permaculture smallholding, documented some of the avian victims on January 2, 2020. The images are posted here with Nick’s permission. Thank you, Nick, for documenting this event so that we can all bear witness. Nick’s…
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Pentti Linkola
Pentti Linkola is something of a conscience for Finland and for humanity. His ideas are radical, often shocking and sometimes dangerous. Yet I’ve shared some of his thoughts in moments, as a visceral reaction to the persistent destruction of the biosphere that I have witnessed, and contributed to, throughout my life. While a lot of…
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Storytelling for the uncanny present
While overseas in November, I caught snippets of news from home: unprecedented bushfire smoke choking major cities; koala populations declared functionally extinct (not all koalas); heritage-listed rainforests burning; farmers traumatised by the screams of dying animals. From afar, these unsettling accounts seem fictional, like the ‘raining frogs’ in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Except in Anderson’s…
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Remembering buntings, forgetting buntings
The Ortolan Bunting and Yellow-breasted Bunting were plentiful during the first decade of my childhood. (I was born in 1975.) The latter was never common in Finland; the country was on the edge of its distribution, but it was an abundant birds throughout its range across northern Eurasia. Well, no more. Yellow-breasted Buntings are no…
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Arts Letters and Numbers residency
How many PhDs does it take to set up a blog? In ‘the plant room’, Timo and I flick jalapeno chip dust off ourselves, smug that we have finally figured out how to insert this blog into the site, on day 3 of a 5-day residency at Arts Letters and Numbers, Averill Park, NY. Although…
PRECARIOUS BIRDS 