Interbeing: An Environmental Art Practice

Abstract

My interdisciplinary art practice, informed by a geological career, is a discourse on the complex inter-relationship of human beings within nature. Interbeing is an installation inspired by a specific event. In June 2013 a catastrophic flood originating in the Canadian Rocky Mountains inundated southern Alberta like an inland tsunami, leaving a swath of destruction along rivers due to erosion, and the deposition of vast cobble beds, a residue of the flood. On a visceral level this experience felt like the end of the world. Through natural cyclical processes the earth is transformed in geological time in contrast to human activity which is transforming the earth on a human timescale. Climate change is impacting the natural earth cycles. Interbeing is located in a natural setting in rural Bragg Creek, Alberta; it is both site specific and universal in its scope. The natural materials, flood stones and forest residue, used for the installation are harvested from the site. “The ambition is not just to translate a local knowledge of place into an artwork that claims to speak universally about nature, but rather to mediate a visceral contact with nature in order to suggest a way of interacting with it.”