Climate change and the magnitude of borrowed time
Art and ecology are interwoven in a rich and timeless seam that has surely helped humans synthesise meaning and comfort since our early days as a species. And this is the landscape navigated by that wonderful organisation known as art.earth – a collective of artists of all sorts who gather to think, make, collaborate, and talk.
We need the art-ecology salve now more than ever, it feels, as we grapple with ecosystem breakdown and climate change on Planet Earth. And so it was that several weeks ago, on a suitably tumultuous night of wind and rain, I took myself off to art.earth’s launch of ‘Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change’, a compendium of creative, clinical, therapeutic, philosophical, and political viewpoints on death and life – human, non-human and planetary.
The book, edited by Mat Osmond and Richard Povall, had been several years in the making, since the kernel was seeded in an all-night grief workshop held in 2016 in a Sharpham woodland in South Devon. I am still meandering my way through its wide-ranging pages that encompass the power of music, ritual, art and movement to transform the heartache triggered by losing people, landscapes and species. And much, much, more – I suspect ‘Borrowed Time’ will become a fruitful and much-dipped-into companion.
Read the whole piece on Penny’s blog.