Let It In

By Adele Ardent

White Sands National Monument, NM

October 31, 2017

The light was fading on the last day. I was cutting it close, but unexpected wind the day before had made my hasty field reconstruction go slowly. The sun had already dropped below the rim of mountains by the time I put my outfit on.

Photos by Jeanette Hart-Mann

I had created the Let You In body extension for class last year, to explore connection and control as a continuum. It was a simple robe that concealed my posture, and a face-cone that both focused attention on the most emotionally revelatory part of my body and allowed me to restrict contact as I chose. This process of revealing and concealing seemed to me to have a sympathetic resonance to White Sands, not just to the slowly shifting dunes, but to the bizarre dual role it’s expected to play: as a playground where children can sled year-round on snowdrifts that never melt, and as a military asset, a buffer zone, from which we were forced to retreat one night as a missile flared to impossible heights and was lost among the stars above Alamogordo.

In this iteration, rather than simply making eye-contact, I asked those willing to actually reach into my space to remove the make-up that added up another layer of concealment/revealment to my face.

Even though my friends and classmates were (quite tenderly) invading my space, I still felt impossibly far away, as if I were looking at their faces and at the pastel wash of the sunset from within fixed and unchangeable memories. One persistent thought that I couldn’t fully push away―although, keep in mind, this was Halloween―was that this is what it would feel like to be a ghost, to be at a permanent remove from full engagement with the surrounding world. Yet, at the same time, even as the failing light was slowly covering up each face and feature of the landscape, everything seemed beautifully amplified, brought physically closer by intense focus.

The landscape at White Sands, so unlike anything else, forces the mind to deal with it directly, rather than through the veils of previous experience, assumption, and approximation that we so often wrap around ourselves. In opening up, in allowing for connection, whether to people or to place―it seems to me that joy and loss are inextricably linked, that to be fully, and open-heartedly awake to the sense of closeness, also means one must be fully awake to the sense of distance, as they are felt by the same metric.

If we opt for control over connection, we’re not choosing safety or comfort, we’re choosing isolation.

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...

Foundations for Breath

By Adele Ardent Eden

Patagonia, AZ

October 20, 2017

Everything is breathing its way into everything else.

Breath: oxygen and carbon and water.

This process cannot be stopped.

Winds and hands and words thrust through the border wall at nearby Nogales. Water penetrates rigid lines of earth, brushes its fingers across the undersides of roots and rocks, works curious fingers into every open place.

A few days ago, some of us gave our breath to a mesquite tree rooted on the “Other Side” of the border wall, the delicate fronds draping down across the barrier into mouth’s reach… carbon and water free to travel their accustomed route into root.

Yesterday, here, I lay with my back against eroding soil that used to be a road, a way for vehicles, now coming apart under the restless roaming of rain, a loose thread that the persistence of storms will pull until it unravels.

I lay there with three stones on my belly, and when I started to giggle at the absurd sight I must have made, the water in my flesh (little rivulets of myosin) laughed them off, sent them tumbling back to the ground: The stones we placed today are not barriers, but the foundations for a home made entirely of doors, where the water can laugh itself, breath itself, back into vivid soil.

Any attempt at impermeability will be torn apart. The things that want in, that need in, (And there are many things that want in: air, water, love, pain) will find a way in, will find a way to insinuate themselves into the larger body of the world, as each breath panted today in exertion will find its way through air into root.

Our work here was in easing the passage of breath, of living things growing one into the other.

Words and Water

By Adele Ardent

Muley Point, Bears Ears National Monument, UT

October 4, 2017

There have been many words shared during this trip, both weighty and light—traditional Diné stories, tales of the impacts of fracking on local communities, stories about far-off family and friends, poems, songs, jokes, riddles. There have been many words spoken in these places over the course of this trip, but I’ve captured almost none of them… At least, not in the expected way: transcribing, recording, capturing the living words and mounting them lifeless with shiny glass eyes to the pages of my journal.

In the past, as someone approaching art from the perspective of painting and drawing, I’ve been very concerned about the artifact, about the final product. I am trying to feel my way towards a way of making that is less about fixing some physical remnant into place, and more about allowing something to come also alive in the spaces between living beings.

Of course, I’m not yet sure how this should work...

As a start, I’ve asked everyone in our group to let me draw their eyes, but while we sit together and my hands are busy, I’m also hoping to draw out whatever part of their story they are willing to trust to me, face to face. I’m also experimenting with different ways of bringing water to the desert plants whose home I’m sharing, using my hair and mouth.

We eat with both mouth and eyes, consuming the world around us in different ways, but our faces are built to give back as well as to take: the tiny muscles around the eyes and mouth are little open gates where rills of feeling can flow outward. Other animals feed their young from their own mouths, and while we’ve forgotten this art, I hope that words and fully offered attention will have their own power to cultivate fallow spaces.

Still from “Water Sharing Experiment,” 2017

In Time

By Adele Ardent

Glen Canyon Dam / Lake Powell, AZ

September 28, 2017

Do you ever consider the reasons that we can’t move freely through time, the way that we can through space? We think of our past selves and our future selves as selves. Changed and changing, perhaps, but still continuously us.

But memories are tools only, made available in the present moment through the effort of complex neurological machinery. We can’t move through time, I think, because ultimately there is no we within the self... only this self, and this self, and—now!—this self. Taking memory’s gathered knowledge to hand doesn’t necessarily make me the creature I once was, any more than picking up my father’s hand plane or chisel makes me into my father.

It was hard to dislike Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam, in spite of all the complexities of place that I knew to be buried under the gathered waters. This system had been made, after all, for me—or rather, for the benefit of future humanity, which the men of 1956 had concerned themselves with even while my parents were waiting to be born, and of which I now, so many years later, hold a small share.

So I took what was offered by the builders of the dam: I washed my limbs in its waters, drank from both flowing tap and ruched wave. I took in the waters through skin and throat, and intricate metabolic processes have no doubt layered some of the proffered oxygen and hydrogen atoms into the strata of my cells, binding two separate and complex systems, human and river, into one. Or, at least, into a before, and an after.

Swimming out to the buoy that marked off Lake Powell’s safe beaches from the turbulence of churning propellers, I felt a shiver—in any other era, I would be flying far above the ground, over rocks and the low, distant course of the free-flowing river. For a moment, I considered whether the weight of my body was supported by delusion more than deluge, if I had only convinced myself that this changed world existed as I saw it to be. In truth I was held aloft only by this small pocket of time, between the stemming of the river and the day when the land will crumple this dam like a sodden paper cup.

I think it is worth noting that many (if not most) of those that authored this place in the 50s and 60s must be dead; their oxygen and hydrogen have been allocated to other projects, as mine also will one day be. And certainly no one who set in motion “the way things are” in our country 150 years ago, 200 years ago, or 300 years ago, is still alive today. We access their thoughts and memories and stories, but it is our hands doing the shaping. It feels like we should be free to make our own choices, and to tell our own stories, but with this much weight, this much inertia… Can we do anything but follow the path that has been so neatly laid out for us, drift down the furrow between the banks, flowing more faithfully than any river?

Opening Up

By Adele Ardent

Four Corners, NM

September 22, 2017

There is a moment that often follows a sudden opening-up of space.

Sometimes, you meet this moment bleary-eyed, stumbling from a late bed to pull aside the curtains and reveal a morning already half-lost to the high-climbing light; sometimes, it finds you when the incoherent pools illuminating unfamiliar city streets resolve into a coherent narrative threaded in orange and gold light. In that moment, eyes and mind look past confining spaces to focus on further, and yet further, distances.

The lands here in the Southwest seem to live in that moment of readjustment ceaselessly, with the earth both perpetually torn open to the sky and yet always frozen in the moment of tearing wider still. It is easy, standing here sky-washed, to imagine each breath borne high and away by untouchable rivers of cloud and star.

It is easy, under these skies, to believe the lie that there is an “away” at all.

I find myself wanting to believe this lie; I find myself wanting to believe that everything will be fine.

In taking pictures of the human disruptions caused by fracking, I’ve found myself focusing upwards instead. Using the panorama algorithm on my phone, I’ve tried to stitch together as many bolts of blue sky and filmy cloud as I can gather by reaching arms overhead and bending back (and back and back further still.)

I want these human disturbances to be as minuscule as they look to be when compared to the immensity of the air. Little truths told by other senses out this lie, of course—a tightness in the chest when Daniel Tso led us on the tour of fracking sites, the sudden pain when blood drips from the nose in the bright-ringing dawn of a bell-clear day, dreams filled with generator vibrations, traveling along eardrum and jaw into gritted teeth.

I want to return to these places to put more pieces of sky together, and reconcile conflicting aims: I want to see the sky as a giant quilt of breath that I can rest comfortably under, big enough to forgive any stain. I want to piece together a way to reveal the lie.

Maps to Minds

By Adele Ardent Eden

Wild Rivers, NM

September 11, 2017

Throughout this trip, I’ve been very interested in the myriad thoughts, preconceptions, and preoccupations that get in one’s way when it comes to seeing the non-human clearly. In Cunningham Gulch, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, I tried to record the intrusive thoughts that kept pulling me away from the present moment and place, with the hope that I might somehow allow for the chance to wipe these (irrelevant?) thoughts away from my internal lens.

In this related work, conducted at the Little Arsenic campground and surrounding trails at the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, I approached questions of perception in another way, by asking members of our group to trace a view of the landscape which I could then use as a map to locate the exact location they used as a viewing-point. As I climbed and circled around in search of these locations, scrambling over rocky terrain, I was in constant engagement with the versions of the people I had created in my mind, trying to connect what I “knew” about them—how they acted, how they felt, where they might go, and what they might do—with the world around me.

One of my frustrations in contemplating these landscapes is that, while breathtakingly gorgeous, they threaten to remain mere beautiful backdrops, “things” which I have no real relationship with. In part, this project was meant to seek a sense of connection to place by co-opting the connections that others felt, while also trying to get a “true” sense of the place by looking at it through a literal handful of viewpoints. I found it interesting (and not a little disturbing) how much more engaged I felt in the land after adding an additional layer of human intention between me and the natural world: There are certain very specific places that I had my own attachment to, where I spent considerable time conducting my own work. Yet, in examining the sweeping vistas or details of the spume around the river rocks, I spent far longer than I would have otherwise in looking and thinking about the life-histories of the plants, rocks, landforms, and creatures: I spent time considering that this rock formation wasn’t as wind-sculpted and water-ravaged as the one depicted on the map, or that this dead tree had likely been dead longer than the one depicted, as it had lost more branches.

Map” by Paul Ross. Photos by Adele Ardent Eden

In retrospect, I thought more about these histories when looking through the maps than I did for the areas that I “used” in my own work simply because I was coming to these places needing from rather than doing to. I “needed” these places to communicate information back to me, as I was constantly asking “here, or here?” through my actions as I moved around, rather than declaring “I’m making this happen!” as I did with my own work.

Map” by Melisse Watson. Photos by Adele Ardent Eden.

Corn and Inheritance

By Adele Ardent Eden

La Villita,NM

September 4, 2017

I’ve been thinking about genetics quite a bit while surrounded by the heritage crops at La Villita—perhaps not surprisingly, as corn is one of the first model organisms used to scientifically study inheritance; each kernel visible on the cob is the genetically unique recipient of its own union and own history, as each kernel can have a different “father.” (This is especially visible on the Glass Gem variety, which looks as much like a coil of beaded necklace as a cob.) In my previous post , I mentioned how one human hand has the weight of the entire system of human civilization behind it—however, this isn’t just the weight of the current civilization, but historical civilization as well. As necessary, and as beautiful, as our domesticated food-plants are, they show the effects of generations of meddling, tinkering, and shaping. Humans diverted the ancestral plants from their niche in the ecosystem and bent them to human use; while traditional indigenous cultures have, more or less, found ways to exist in a relationship with vital non-human elements like maize (with some giving it spiritual weight comparable to that of their human forbearers) as a “western-civilization-based” human, I’ve struggled on this trip with finding a way to interact with the world that isn’t about absolute control...a way to allow place to shape me in turn.

I had to find a way toward understanding in a round-about way: through genetics, which is what I initially studied. There is one idea I keep coming back to, although it might be more familiar through genealogy than genetics: pedigree collapse (amusingly laid out here in great detail). We each have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-grandparents...and if one follows this back far enough, say a little more than 30 generations, each person would have more people in his or her family tree than are alive on the earth at this moment. However, we are all the result of some inbreeding, so the family tree starts to collapse again as one looks back through time. If one traces their ancestry to a particular place, that individual may be related to everyone who lived in that region.

If you combine this with the fact that each person has only two “slots” for each gene (one inherited maternally and one paternally), it becomes clear that much of the genetic information—the instructions on how to make one particular version of a human being—available in your lineage was lost in getting to you: Of the 256 sets of potentially unique genes available to you in your specific set of great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, you only retained two copies. And the further back you go, the less you are genetically related to any one individual; in fact, because inheritance is random, and you aren’t allotted an equal amount of genetic material from all of your ancestors, your distant ancestors may have no genetic link to you at all.

Yet, if any one of these individuals had made different choices, taken a different path, you would not exist. And if genetic connection is not the arbiter of ancestry that we consider it to be, then the other humans, the plants, the animals, and the places that shaped “our ancestors” are then just as much our ancestors as the humans we find in our family tree: All the choices had to be made just so for the current world, for us, to exist. If this is so, control, then, must be a myth—our path is determined by the way itself and what is encountered there, rather than our own two feet, and we are being shaped as much as we shape—even if we are unaware of it. This also means that the places, plants, and animals that we invest our interactions in are as much the ancestors of far-future humanity as we may become.

Binding/Repair

By Amy Catherine Hulshoff & Adele Ardent Eden

Rio Grande Headwaters, CO

September 1, 2017

AAE: It is clear how much we are reliant on a chain of civilization to survive in these “wild” landscapes, even in those that are being used as playgrounds for city-living humans to go “out” and “get away from it all.” We have to bring our technologies with us to survive, our mass-produced food, shelter, and tools. A human hand on the landscape is never a singular hand; we are touching the land through the hands of others who have made our presence possible.

Still from “Binding/Repair” collaborative project by Amy Catherine Hulshoff & Adele Ardent Eden.

In my previous work, I’ve wanted to explore the complex systems that arise between individuals in relationship, and the ways that we balance a need for connection against a need for control. In this collaborative work with Amy Catherine Hulshoff, we explored a relationship between two humans and the ice formation that encloses and contributes to the stream that shapes Cunningham Gulch. We found ourselves working with similar materials, such as needle and red thread, but diverged in our goals and actions: She was looking at ways to repair the deteriorating ice, while I was looking for ways to break into it...

Still from “Binding/Repair” collaborative project by Amy Catherine Hulshoff & Adele Ardent Eden.

As we sewed ourselves together, and to the ice, for me, this became about the challenges of finding points of connection to the landscape and to my new community that were strong, without being too destructive, or too binding.

ACH: Working with Adele opened up a new channel of communication for my work, not only between myself and another person, but between myself and our materials. Working to cope with the surroundings at the headwaters worked best if I attempted to essentialize my arena. However, in pulling bits and pieces from the landscape I found myself left with mostly broken pieces of a much bigger system- specifically here in this work we had what was left of a small glacier like tract of snow bridging the stream near our campground. I felt the need then to attempt to "repair" or stitch back together the winter's detritus of snow, sticks, and stones. With Adele, sewing our hands together, and into the ice, showed me one of the many possible way to insert myself back into this system, rather than impose myself upon it. This small performance of repair and communion echoes a much larger attempt to form an equitable relationship with the environment. I think this begins with a type of communication that exists more in material and less within an understood notion of "language".