Surgeon and Seamstress

By Adele Ardent

Gila Wilderness, NM

October 25, 2017

It is a process of feeling more than seeing, trying to find the little gaps where the needle can slip through without damaging the threads of the fabric.

I am not yet skilled at sewing; my stitches are uneven, and I could never seem to get a comfortable rhythm going before the thread tangled.

In crafting my iteration of a “plant-carrying apparatus,” I was focused on getting it done, so that I could move on to the “real” interaction with the much-renamed Tufty, the Leyland cypress kind enough to collaborate with Paul and me as we explored the possibilities of empathetic engagement between plant and animal forms.

Left: Photo by Paul Ross. Right: Photo by Adele Ardent

In crafting my iteration of a “plant-carrying apparatus,” I was focused on getting it done, so that I could move on to the “real” interaction with the much-renamed Tufty, the Leyland cypress kind enough to collaborate with Paul and me as we explored the possibilities of empathetic engagement between plant and animal forms.

But, while carrying her around, sharing breath, and resting in the river yielded some interesting artistic directions for us to explore, I find myself thinking of this dismissed preparatory stage as something perhaps at least as valuable as the experience we were consciously trying to facilitate...

I had hoped that sitting still in the sunlight would provide a starting place for gaining empathy for a more sedentary form of life, but viewing inactivity as an attribute of plants is mere animal-life bias. It would be more accurate to think of those like Tufty as something akin to both surgeon and seamstress, with amending roots communally suturing the wide bolts of soil and rock into living skin.

Sitting in the sun, feeling down into the fabric with my needle, I was perhaps closer to understanding the active life of plants than I realized...

I have, perhaps, still much more to learn from them about building an artistic practice that allows for collaboration in the context of the wider community of living things, a way to bring together different ways of seeing, and thinking, and feeling...