Entangled Expanse
Corinne Ryan
Thesis
My project aims to articulate a sense of reintegration and connectedness with nature locally. This concept takes connectivity at its core in highlighting the expanse of urbanity and its rewilding landscape. These ecosystems are often too small or large for unaided vision, and this refocus is the end goal of this piece. This piece aims to foster a sense of hope for the future of nature, even within the expanse of urbanity and the decline of the ecosystem. By pointing to vital interdependencies within the urban landscape and the increasing juxtaposition between naturality and artificiality within the climate movement, Entangled Expanse intends to refocus perspectives to acknowledge the flourishing of rudimental biodiversity in human-altered environments, which carries a large message about the potential for decentralized and non-coercive models of climate adaptation.
Readings
The evolution of Entangled Expanse was inspired by a great number of art works, artists, and literature across the globe. Focusing on the latter, a great deal of literature impacted the overall focus of my piece as well. One such work was Rose B. Simpson’s “With Applied Creativity, We Can Heal” (2021). This work’s focus on permaculture and Indigenous futurism coined the term “applied aesthetics,” which was inspirational to my project. Simpson’s idea of “applied aesthetics” represents a fundamental awareness of how to be in the world, and I want to embody this in my pictures. By taking on an unedited, holistic perspective on the urban landscape, I want to creatively capture attention towards the rudimentary biodiversity within the city landscape. Another inspirational work of literature for my piece was Saskia Wit’s book titled “Hidden Landscapes: the Metropolitan garden and the genius loci” (2018). This book focused on the relation of spaces with their environment, similar to my own focus with Entangled Expanse. This work highlights the duality between artificiality and naturality. Oftentimes, nature can be seen to be in juxtaposition to the metropolitan landscape, as the needs of a city tend to eliminate vast amounts of biodiversity. This work motivated my intentions to study city gardens and the hidden qualities behind the ecological space. Additionally, I was greatly inspired by Anna Tsing, Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Swanson’s work titled “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene” (2017). This book highlighted the more-than-human Anthropocene, where humans are currently threatening multispecies livability. Far-reaching cities have been built on top of nature, and this landscape is haunted by past ways of life. Reading this book gave me a sense of grief and sorrow as I looked at the urban architecture and what it could have been if left alone. This grief inspired me to seek a path of hope within the urban landscape. I wanted to bring attention to how nature within the city is still surviving and will continue to do so, not simply ghosts of the past. The survivability of plants was brought to my attention in Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures” (2020). This book solidified my project’s underlying themes as it explored the often-overlooked organisms within the urban landscape and how interconnected they can be. Life forms can completely interpenetrate and change each other continuously. One of my project's core goals is to influence people’s focus to begin to see the ecologies that are either too small or too large for unaided vision. Anna Tsing’s book titled “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,” (2015) explores a similar theme to Sheldrake’s claims about interconnectedness among diverse ecologies. This interaction and connection have the potential to change entire landscapes. This inspired my interest in interspecies interaction and what landscapes have popped up around us as a result.
Artworks
Aside from these inspiring sources from the Art Library, I also utilized art works and literature from Feral Atlas, Anna Tsing, and Jeremy Rifkin. Feral Atlas’s work, titled “The More-Than-Human Anthropocene,” 1 offers a digital way of analyzing and comprehending the Anthropocene as well as the entire worlds and ecologies that are created when nonhuman entities become tangled with human infrastructure. He termed these “feral” ecologies, which are often encouraged by human-built infrastructures. This inspired the focus of my piece to delve into these wild ecologies that may be thriving amongst the urban landscape.
In addition to literature, many diverse artworks and artists played a large role in the development and underlying rationale of my final piece. Embedded within Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Art and Climate Change (2022), were many art works that motivated the forward-looking aspects of my piece and presented messages and solutions for the climate crisis that informed my own perspectives. One such artist that the peer reviews of my fellow classmates drew my attention to was Maria Thereza Alves’ long-term project titled Seeds of Change (1999-2023) 2. Her work was aesthetically very similar to my own, with the medium of photography and capturing rewilding plants growing within the cracks of concrete. Alves’ attention to a “new wild” with human interference with the natural world. While Alves focuses on “ballast flora,” my own project takes a more broader stance towards this rewilding phenomenon occurring. Another artist was Diana Lelonek in her collection titled Centre for Living Things (2016-23) 3. This collection was spurred by the artist’s motivation to investigate the novel transformation of the biosphere into the plastisphere (Fowkes, 31). The collection focuses on the micro- and macro-biotic communities that are now adapting to plastics. Lelonek’s artwork inspired me to more closely examine these evolving communities within the artificiality of the urban landscape. In this way, Lelonek directly inspired my growing curiosity about investigating ecosystems of synanthropes (species that adapt to artificial habitats). Our world has been transformed by anthropogenic interventions, and this artwork inspired my shifting focus to the more-than-human anthropocene. Another artist’s work inspired by the creation of my own was Reena Kallat’s series Siamese Trees (2018-2019) 4 . The piece featured electricity cables that were intricately braided together to form inverted and conjoined trees in the shape of human lungs (Fowkes, 75). Despite superimposing human conflicts and infrastructure onto vast ecosystems, this artist demonstrates these conjoined forms as an allusion to nature’s defiance of artificially imposed human influences. This piece inspired a poetic imagination of nature’s goal to flourish and reunite together in a shared ecosystem once more. This imagination sparked a sense of hope for nature’s innate ability to thrive and flourish despite being threatened by the apocalyptic growth of the city, hence the focus on this subject within my photography.
Nandita Kumar’s work, titled The Unwanted Ecology (2017)5 consisted of a glass jar containing dried samples of twenty plants designated as weeds, each of which emitted sound frequencies electronically (Fowkes, 82). The artist’s goal for the installation piece was to re-enact missed or invisible encounters between plants and people. This motivated my intention to showcase small ecologies within my works that are often too small or large for unaided vision. Kumar’s piece directly inspired my work’s goal to rekindle viewers’ appreciation for neglected ecosystems and the resilient biodiversity that surrounds us every day in the face of a degrading landscape and a changing climate as global warming intensifies. Another artist who conceptualized this corrective view of the Anthropocene is Alma Heikkilä’s large-scale paintings titled warm and moist | decaying wood (2019) 6. Heikkilä’s painting depicts dark microbial life forms against natural light, which draws attention to the fact that humans play such a minor part within the biosphere (Fowkes, 120). This artist asserted that understanding the invisible world of smaller ecologies and microbes is a precondition for dealing with the unique problem of climate change. My piece took this view to the core of its understanding, and sought to recognize human dependence on nature and circumvent our sense of individuality.
Two other artists’ works that focused on the self-management of plants directly inspired my evolving perspective for my final piece. Annalee Davis’s collaborative project, titled (Bush) Tea Plots (2019-2020) 7, focused on ecological damage caused by human tendencies and nature’s innate ability to restore harmony to an environment scarred by these physical legacies. This piece reframed my perspective on the subject matter of my photos. I began to view harmony in the growth of plant life and developed an emphatic impulse towards such regrowth. Human-made infrastructure took on an apocalyptic nature, where thriving ecosystems provided harmony to the scarred landscape. If many people began to see the city as a scar running through an otherwise harmonious landscape of nature, where does this leave the future of humanity? I attempt to address this juxtaposition between naturality and human-made artificiality within my photography in light of Davis’s inspiring message. Another artist’s work that comments on the self-management of plants is Suzanne Husky’s Jardin à la française savage (2013) 8. The layout for this artwork was a floral labyrinth to challenge the traditional nature of gardens as a model of material domination over nature (Fowkes, 84). This inspired my focus not to involve purposeful garden spaces within the urban landscape but rather to focus on ecosystems that grow in relation to the spaces within their environment. Husky’s focus inspired my piece to challenge the aesthetic instrumentalization of nature within the urban landscape. This focus lies in the premonition of a future with plants adapting to a changing climate in order to survive, even if the human-made infrastructure fails to do so. The goal of my project is to rekindle an appreciation for neglected ecosystems that thrive within the urban landscape, with a special focus on uncultivated and self-managed plants. As global warming continues to endanger entire societies and ecosystems, the flourishing of rudimental biodiversity in human-altered environments carries a large message about the potential for decentralized and non-coercive models of climate adaptation.
Integrating Rifkin
From Jeremy Rifkin’s work titled “The Age of Resilience,” I was inspired by the term “biophilic consciousness.” This term proposes that a younger generation has begun to project an emphatic impulse towards nature, which reasserts our kinship with the natural world. Humans' attachment to nature will never leave us, and I want to capture this sense of connectivity in my project. There is an inseparable link between the anthropocene and the more-than-human anthropocene, and through my piece, I wished to explore how this connection merges in the urban landscape.
My work
Comprehensively, Entangled Expanse attempts and hopes to influence its viewers to see the more-than-human temporalities of local biodiversity. The implications of my project’s underlying conceptualities point to the potential for a decentralized and non-coercive model of climate adaptation. Entangled Expanse demonstrates firsthand how nature has the innate ability to survive. I assert in this piece that nature will be a part of the future, no matter how much the man-made environment surrounding it attempts to bury, hide, or coercively hinder the growth of ecosystems. Within Entangled Expanse, the collage of pictures comes together to portray nature surviving within the urban landscape. However, as we have learned in this class, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With the collage of photos, I aim to foster a poetic imagination of nature’s ability to flourish for the world’s future, despite the increasingly pressing impact of climate change. One single image conveys an apocalyptic aesthetic with a rewilding urban landscape. On the other hand, a collage acknowledges a more generalizable extent to which the flourishing of rudimental biodiversity exists in human-altered environments. My peers also played a very strong role in the future evolution of Entangled Expanse. Many people suggested making it more interactive, and this influenced my idea to digitize the collage and allow the viewer to interact with each individual photograph. Each photograph focuses on a specific plant or biodiversity, so adding in an educational description about each one would further enhance new perceptions of the surrounding ecology. Entangled Expanse will evolve beyond its current format, representing the ever-evolving, rewilding, urban landscape surrounding us.
Bibliography:
Fowkes, M., & Fowkes, R. (2022) Art and Climate Change. Thames and Hudson.
Simpson, R., & Horton, J., Demos, T.J., & Scott, E., & Banerjee, S., (Ed.) (2021). “With Applied Creativity We Can Heal.” In The routledge companion to contemporary art, visual culture, and climate change. Essay, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Wit, S. de. (2014). Hidden Landscapes: the Metropolitan garden and the genius loci. TU Delft.
Tsing, A. L. (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Tsing, A L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press.
Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds And Shape Our Futures (First Edition). Random House Publishing Group.
Rifkin, Jeremy: THE AGE OF RESILIENCE. (2022). Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Media LLC.
Citing Artworks
[fig 1] Tsing, A. L. (1970, January 1). The-more-than-human anthropocene. Feral Atlas. https://feralatlas.org/
[fig 2] Alves, Maria Thereza. Seeds of Change: Liverpool. 2004. In World of Art: Art and Climate Change by Reuben Fowkes. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.
[fig 3] Lelonek, Diana. Centre for Living Things. Warsaw: Foundation for Visual Arts, 2019. In World of Art: Art and Climate Change by Reuben Fowkes. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.
[fig 4] Kallat, Reena. Siamese Trees. 2018-19. In World of Art: Art and Climate Change by Reuben Fowkes. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.
[fig 5] Kumar, Nandita. The Unwanted Ecology. 2017. In World of Art: Art and Climate Change by Reuben Fowkes. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.
[fig 7] Davis, Annalee. (Bush) Tea Plot - A Decolonial Patch for Mill Workers. 2020. In World of Art: Art and Climate Change by Reuben Fowkes. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.
[fig 8] Husky, Suzanne. Jardin à la française sauvage. 2013. In World of Art: Art and Climate Change by Reuben Fowkes. London: Thames and Hudson, 2022.