February 2022’s guest artists were Gaia Redgrave, Jude Allen and Natasha Clarke.
As usual, the three guest artists shared their work and open a discussion.
Chat
Here is the chat session
Video
Gaia Redgrave
Gaia says:
I’ll be presenting about…two distinct but overlapping projects which have emerged from Rewilding the Artist an ACW funded R&D project.
Earthsong – the embodiment of me.
Cathedral of the trees – the embodiment of social and environmental change.
This is me…
Gaia is a neurodivergent visual artist, facilitator, and diversity advocate, living and working in West Wales. Her work is autoethnographical and performative, concerning itself with a deep connection to space and place, exploring how our sense of belonging, to landscape, place or culture, impacts our sense of self and our emotional health and well-being.
Gaia’s work describes a pathway to ‘wilding’ the self and celebrates authenticity. Her current research investigates the connections between humans and the unseen, spiritually encountered space we identify as Spirit of Place. Gaia’s engagement with the land is particularly focused on the landscape of Mynydd Preseli.
Exploring landscape and her own sensory experience, she constructs and curates a narrative of human and natural existence both past and present, which is documented and shared through film, performance, photography and site-specific interventions.
Gaia’s interactions with the Spirit of Place began as a child, as she explored the gardens and woodlands around her childhood home and observed the more-than-human beings who reside there. As a neurodivergent person, Gaia is gifted with heightened sensory perception resulting in a lifelong sensitivity to the nuances of space and environment. Her work using water as a method of recording experience is one example of her acute attention to her environment
See more & follow me details…
Website: www.gaiaredgrave.co.uk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gaiaredgrave/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gaia_redgrave
Contact me details…
Email: gaiaredgrave@gmail.com
Jude Allen
Jude Allen has a PhD in Human/Animal Metamorphosis in C20th Literature, and a background in both Ecocriticism and the representation of the body. She introduced and curated the Written Word day at the Soil Culture Forum in 2014. She has extensively researched soil and Literature, and has published articles on animal transformation and tree communication.
Soil Voices –
Seed funded by British Society of Soil Science and set up in 2020 by Jude Allen and Isla Robertson, and part of Our Living Soil, Soil Voices is a project that builds connections between writers, soil practitioners, food producers and consumers.
Healthy soils are also a major store of carbon. If we degrade and erode our soils through unsustainable agriculture, pollute them with chemicals, or seal them under concrete with urban development, our soils cannot function as they should. As a result, the billions of tons of carbon that can be stored in our soil are released into the atmosphere, adding to the climate crisis.
The project aims to raise awareness of the importance of soil, particularly amongst people who are not normally interested in it, by bringing soil back into the heart of human storytelling culture. We gather stories that reconnect us to the soil, reintroducing lost experiences and knowledge of how much all of us depend on the stuff that is beneath our feet. We want to get people excited about soil, and bring it back into our conversations, building connections between writers, soil practitioners, food producers and consumers.
Jude is Director and Tutor at: http://judeallen1.wix.com/oceansoflearningUN Accredited Climate Change Teacher
Co-founder of Soil Voices https://soilvoices.org @SoilVoices
Secretary OHS Environment and Climate Change SIGResearch interests: English Literature, Animal Studies, Eco-criticism, Soil and Culture
Natasha Clarke
Natasha Clarke is an herbalist, storyteller and artist living in the woods and by the beach on Camano Island, north of Seattle, Washington. She was born in England and true to her adventurous childhood spent in Africa, Switzerland and Paris, she continued getting her life degree by hitchhiking around Europe installing interactive art sculptures before finally settling in the United States to raise a family. It was through the study and implementation of permaculture based food gardens that she became entranced with medicinal herbs and she culminated her herbal education in a year long forest medicine intensive with Scott Kloos and the School of Forest Medicine.
Natasha has been a practicing herbalist for 10 years, is founder of The Green Gathering, a Washington based, community led, annual herb festival, as well as educating young and old with plant walks, wildcrafting skills and medicine making classes locally and at various herbal conferences in the Pacific Northwest. She has enthused her love for the green folk over the airwaves with The Herb Hunter, a weekly broadcasted radio show for KSER about her wildcrafting adventures, always inspired to bring the people to the plants, the plants to the people, in so deepening and healing our connection to our mother earth.