By Mary Woodbury

Thanks so much to Stormbird Press‘s Donna Mulvenna for allowing the reprinting of this interview. She talked with Amy Barker about her new novel, Paradise Earth, published by Stormbird Press in early 2020. Amy was the winner of Australia’s 2008 Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Emerging Author. Her stunning debut novel Omega Park won the 2012 IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) Ena Noël Award, and was shortlisted for the 2009 FAW Christina Stead Award.

The aftershocks from 1996 continued, year after year, often in the life of the individual more devastating than the Port Arthur massacre itself. Yet always the subsequent tragedies could be traced back to that unspeakable Sunday.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Coming home to Tasman Peninsula with her Northern Irish partner, Ruth journeys into her own psychic trauma as well as that projected onto the raw, monumental coast. When Ruth’s brother, John, helps his fourteen-year-old son apply for a firearm permit – almost two-and-a-half decades after Port Arthur â€“ they risk condemning those who do not remember the past to repeat it.

A Port Arthur survivor, Marina has returned to the Peninsula with her brother Moon to pack up Doo-No-Harm, the family holiday home, after their mother’s death. Marina’s personhood was so violated by her early life experience that she has been left an angry she-wolf about to set out on the hunt. In a convoy of duck rescuers, the siblings head for a confrontation with shooters on the wetland.

In these lives choreographed by trauma, damage, and the ramifications of willful forgetfulness, transformation can only occur after an extremely painful lesson.

CHAT WITH AUTHOR

Donna: Hi Amy. Paradise Earth. It’s just fantastic. I pushed many aspects of my life aside so that I could keep reading. One of the things I loved most was the powerful way in which you introduced readers to issues that divide communities throughout the world today. Can you tell us what motivated you to write about the events surrounding the Port Arthur massacre and how you are able to write with such profound empathy for each character?

As a writer, there is really no higher compliment you can receive than a reader telling you they felt compelled to continue reading your book so I appreciate that. I certainly felt compelled to write Paradise Earth. I found myself uniquely poised to write about the events in a work of fiction. While not at Port Arthur on the day of the massacre, I spent my formative years on Tasman Peninsula, with both victims and members of the gunman’s family. If I had been more directly affected, I imagine I would not have been willing, nor able, to explore the events in a novel. At the same time, without the personal connection to the subject matter I would not have found the courage to approach it. One of my main motivations to write Paradise Earth was to explore the unanswered questions – those of the community, survivors, and all those affected – that still surround the massacre.

Regarding issues that divide communities, as one of my characters says in the book, there are a lot of good people who own guns. In Australia, we’ve determined that there’s no place for guns that are nothing but human-killing devices and after Port Arthur these were banned. The novel examines the genuine reasons for private firearm ownership (including self-loading and pump action rifles and shotguns) that remain, i.e., recreational hunting and primary production.

As a work in progress, Paradise Earth won the 2013 DJ ‘Dinny’ O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship, the judges commenting that the narrative “is deeply inward and managed with a keen eye”. It is due to be released in April 2020. How long has it taken to write the book and why?

I began writing Paradise Earth in July 2009, during the week leading up to the release of my debut novel, Omega Park. In all the excitement, I sought sanctuary at Varuna, The National Writers House in the Blue Mountains, where I found time and space to write the opening 15,000 words of a first draft. So it has taken me essentially ten years to write the book. The best way I can think to explain the process is that during that time I didn’t only write one book but a series of books. With each new book, while things like the main setting and core characters remained, there was always a completely new plot, certain characters were killed off and others introduced. Even the core characters grew and changed from one book to the next, for example, entering different professions or becoming parents.

The reason for a constantly evolving novel is so that it remains connected with the outside world. That means while you are writing you are monitoring important events or news relevant to your subject matter, collecting this information and then reflecting it back within the world of your novel. With a major project like this, you have to be able to adapt.

You hold degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing. I have to ask… can anyone learn to write like this or do you possess an innate gift?

I was writing from a very early age. I have “work” from when I was about five years old. I remember in my final year of primary school winning a competition amongst all of the students in my grade to create the dust jacket of a novel. It was the cover art and a blurb for the back cover. Then in high school, my English teachers would tell me they would “be first in line to buy the bestseller.” Personally, I consider it a gift but such a gift is not much use without discipline, commitment, and sacrifice. Anyone will learn valuable things by doing a creative writing or related degree but knowing what I do about the life of a writer, I wouldn’t advise anyone to pursue it as a career unless they felt they had no other options, that it was their calling. If you love something as much as you love writing, and you’re as good at it, then don’t write. Choose the other thing. As the author Hubert Selby Jr. put it, “Being an artist doesn’t take much. Just everything you got.”

I believe you were well on your way to becoming a lawyer, when you had a drastic change of direction and pursued writing instead. What initial steps did you take to become a writer?

I did in fact re-enroll in law, right before my credits were due to expire for prior studies, my last chance to get my degree, with the sole aim of practicing animal law. A few weeks into the semester, I was offered an internship with a film producer (the first money I ever earned from writing was having a feature film screenplay commissioned and optioned), so I quit again!

The initial serious step I took to becoming an author was to apply for an elite course, a Fine Arts degree that only accepted twelve creative writing students each year. As part of the application you had to submit a folio of your work. I used this as a test for myself, to see if someone qualified might think that I possessed potential and/or talent. As it turned out, I was ranked first amongst all the applicants that year and I graduated with distinction after three years of study. In my final year, I began work on what was to be my debut novel, Omega Park, working with a supervisor. Five years later, Omega Park was published.

Amy, you have won multiple awards and received wide critical acclaim for your first novel, Omega Park. What has that early acknowledgement meant to you? And did it change how you wrote Paradise Earth?

The kinds of acknowledgements you’ve mentioned certainly help to increase your confidence. After the publication of Omega Park, probably the most meaningful thing I read from a critic was a comment about me being a courageous author who is not afraid to tackle confronting issues of contemporary Australian life. When writing a book like Paradise Earth, you reflect on this kind of feedback time and again, particularly during trying periods. It provides ongoing encouragement.

What do you like most about Paradise Earth? Do you have a favorite moment, character, or line? And when you began writing were their moments when your inspiration surprised you?

This is a difficult question for me to answer. Honestly, what I like most about Paradise Earth is my personal connection to the subject matter. To have felt that I not only ought to write this novel but that I must write this novel, that this was my novel to write, to have completed this long and often times challenging mission (“task” just doesn’t do the journey justice), and to have found it the absolutely perfect publishing home. The existence of this novel gives extra meaning to my past and adds value to life experiences. It really is much more than just a work of fiction to me.

Stormbird Press is a relatively new press whose mission it is to defend nature and empower communities through the power of story. Why is it important to you to align yourself with an organization that is trying to make positive change in the world?

Stormbird’s mission is one very close to my own heart. I consider signing with Stormbird Press to not only be a great opportunity but an excellent investment. As an author, my success is Stormbird’s success and as a publisher whose mission I deeply care about, Stormbird’s ultimate success is my success. In my view, this is true partnership and the kind that is difficult, if not near on impossible, to find as an author in the publishing world. I can’t imagine any other existing publisher that would have been the right one for Paradise Earth so I am very blessed.

What do you hope people will learn from your portrayal of the Port Arthur massacre, its effects on individuals and community, the legacy of violence, and the suffering on the physical landscape?

I would hope that a reader might learn that the Port Arthur massacre is in many ways still an open wound – in the lives of individuals within the Tasman Peninsula community and beyond, as well as on the place Port Arthur and its surrounds. As such, the massacre remains an event deserving of our attention, understanding, and compassion. Most of all, I hope that readers might be provoked to ask questions about aspects of the current state of the world and what Port Arthur can still teach us about the reality that hurt people do hurt people and so not only our compassion but our common sense should tell us that to do no harm should be our ever present goal if we don’t want cycles of violence to continue and the past to repeat itself.

Have you found it particularly challenging having factual events and such a notorious figure as a key focus of your novel? How do you find that balance of fact and fiction, particularly with such sensitive subject matter?

Everything in the novel surrounding the gunman and the massacre is based on facts and the real historical events. My characters are the only fictional creations, as well as a couple of locations on Tasman Peninsula: a local cemetery and a fishing spot. Writing about this, or any other real world tragedy, is always going to be an ethically charged process. As an author you must listen most carefully to the voices of those affected, particularly those directly affected by the event. If you do that, it won’t be easy but you will have a constant guide throughout what might otherwise be a perilous journey.

One of the reviews of Omega Park stated: “Despite a cast of memorable characters, the real hero in this debut novel is the setting, a uniquely Queensland environment, but one sadly underexplored in fiction.” The same might be said of Paradise Earth. Why is the strong evocation of “place” such an important aspect of your work, which in some respects, could be seen as a central character?

When I think about it, I did begin Paradise Earth simply with place rather than a story. The time I spent living on Tasman Peninsula as a child affected me deeply and continues to affect me now. There is no other place quite like it. When it came time to write my second novel, I wanted to capture, or at least represent this place, in a work of fiction. What I soon found is that it is impossible to write about Tasman Peninsula without writing about Port Arthur and once you begin writing about Port Arthur, the events of 1996 in particular, this is such a vitally important subject matter that it subsumes any other potential narratives. I know that at least one of the reasons I feel such an affinity with the Peninsula is its unique geology. The coastline is stunningly beautiful and yet this unique beauty is the result of damage: millions of years of wind and wave erosion. This appeals to me as a powerful metaphor of the human psyche, that it is possible our own personal damage can result in a beauty that makes us unique, who we are, if you like. It’s a question of embracing it. I would challenge anyone to spend a significant length of time on Tasman Peninsula and not be affected by it in a profound way. As an author, I feel much obliged that I have a medium to be able to share my deep and lasting impressions with others in what I hope is a meaningful way.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

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Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Rose McAdoo

How does a New York City pastry chef get involved in addressing the climate changes affecting our planet’s most remote locations? Albeit necessary, the “doom and gloom” messaging of climate change can feel overwhelming, leaving us confused about how to interact with our home. I am a fierce believer in using the excitement and attention around cakes to redirect conversation and inspire connection. Through desserts, we can literally consume science and information – and redirect our fears about climate change toward joy and celebration.

After making high-end cakes for luxury events and celebrity wedding clients, I tired of the blinding diamond rings, the over-the-top first birthday parties, and the pretty white cakes with flowers. I realized that while cakes captured the grandness of celebration, unity, and creativity, I craved the telling of larger stories: the international refugee crisis, women’s rights, and the ever-reduced support for environmental protection. I made the heart-wrenching decision to leave Brooklyn and start celebrating those protecting our public lands and wild spaces.

On New Year’s Eve in 2018, our chartered military C-130 landed in Antarctica and I immediately began my work as a sous chef for McMurdo Station, the largest research base on the continent. After-hours, scientists explained their work at public science lectures where their vivacious passion for microscopic diatoms, atmospheric photon counts, the sex lives of prehistoric fish, and satellite sea ice measurements only made sense to me by reformatting their data as cake layers, tiers, and fondant decorations. I saw their science in sugar, and I was enraptured. 

After my seasonal contract ended, I flew 10,000 miles north to Alaska and set up a makeshift art studio in an Antarctic janitor’s log cabin, which I had to myself while he worked on the North Slope. There, I shipped hundreds of dollars of fondant, tools, and cake decorating materials, and spent a full week researching paleontology, microbiology, glaciology, polar operations, and aerospace engineering. After reading scientific blogs, watching educational videos, and digging into Antarctic outreach articles, I began creating the cakes I had originally sketched out on the ice. By reimagining the images and personal stories shared during science teams’ lectures, I was able to make the vast abundance of research taking place at the bottom of the world completely edible. These cakes joyfully captured the attention of a national audience with the support of NPR, Forbes, and the Mystic Seaport Museum. 

But cakes are frivolous. Unnecessary. Easily done without. And, of course, the same arguments have been made about our environment. As political leaders push for greater access to oil, lumber, and profit, I wanted to dig deeper – to use desserts to celebrate the need for, and abundance of, our public lands – to make environmental conservation literally digestible. My friend and fellow pastry chef Rose Lawrence flew north from Los Angeles to meet me in Alaska, and we packed our backpacks and started hiking.

It’s one thing to make desserts in a kitchen or a restaurant. While I had doubts whether it would work, I felt my edible art would have greater impact if it was crafted on the glaciers and in the forests that were being affected by climate change – using the earth as an ingredient. With a combined 100 pounds of butter, sugar, flour, heavy cream, eggs, tools, and fresh local sourdough starter strapped to our backs, we spent a week trekking into the wilds of Alaska to film the creation of our desserts in their “natural environments” – aiming to merge pastry arts and climate change, and using video to bring people around the world on this visual journey with us. We stopped to forage along the way: wild salmonberries, fireweed blossoms, watermelon berries, pineapple weed, and late autumn blueberries littered the bright red tundra.

Butane canister ablaze, we simmered three colorful jams and whisked together an herbal pastry cream, using everything we had foraged along the way. We infused sugar with wildflowers and fried brioche under the thick canopy of America’s northernmost temperate rainforest. Hot donuts burst open with the diversity of flora among the ferns and accumulated biomass.

Following our brilliant 23-year-old female glacier guide, Jordan Campbell, I ignited my JetBoil, cooked sugar, and made hard candy atop Matanuska Glacier to demonstrate the valley’s crevasse breaking patterns. Transparent raindrop cakes – made with nothing but freshwater glacial runoff and seaweed gel – encased the plants we collected along the way, showing the succession of regrowth after glacial recession.

 We pitched my tent above Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park, made and buried ice cream in the snow overnight, and whipped egg whites into stiff meringue as a storm rolled in overhead. Our attempt at a flaming Baked Alaska on Harding Icefield was designed to illuminate the state’s wildest forest fires and record high temperatures.

In Denali National Park, I accepted an offer to return to Antarctica. This time it would be a full year – a summer at NASA’s atmospheric research camp and then spending the long, dark winter forklifting hazardous waste shipped from the South Pole and learning rescue techniques on our Search and Rescue team. Again, I started the five-day journey south, this time filling my backpacks with cake decorating supplies and fondant to supplement my “extreme cold weather” gear.

The story we’re told about Antarctica is one of absence, of nothingness, and of harshness. But really, it’s a place full of life: human life, yes, but also bacterial life, wildlife, fungal life, deep sea life, glacial life, and volcanic life. It is a fiercely dynamic place. After nearly 500 days on ice, I felt Antarctica’s influence on my journey as a human, as a creative, as a woman, and as a friend.

I wonder what would happen if we changed Antarctica’s story? What if we ended the narrative of it being an inhospitable place incapable of supporting life? Instead, what if we become the place? We need to stop seeing ourselves as separate from our surroundings, and start considering the ways in which we become entwined with our environment – the crevasses etched into the wrinkles on our faces, our pale skin mirroring the frozen sea ice stretched out before us. On my last day in Antarctica, before entering a world newly ravaged by a global pandemic, I carried a four-tier cake up onto the ridge line and created a sugar self-portrait – my own wind-whipped hair becoming the topographic lines of the Ross Island Peninsula.

If we become the place, then we protect the place. Because in protecting the place, we protect the things that have made us who we are.

Through cakes – by finding unique ways to create art – I’ve learned nearly everything I know. As I create, I learn about places and about the threats to those places. I learn how interconnected we are as a human species. I learn how we are tied to our planet. I learn about the way glaciers form, move, and retreat. I learn about endemic and invasive species. I learn about human impact. I learn about Indigenous groups and systemic environmental racism. I learn personal stories. I learn ways to tell these stories through edible art: how to depict the loss of a specific habitat, or the miraculous expansion of a protected area, or the interconnectedness of an environment visually, on cake. I learn who I am: both my responsibility to my planet and my responsibility to encourage others to spark new ways of interacting with our world.

(Top image: Using desserts to document the environment by crafting pastry in the wild backcountry, Harding Icefield, Alaska. Photo by Rose Lawrence.)

______________________________

Rose McAdoo is a visual artist using cake to raise awareness around global issues. Her unique edible art centers around environmental protection and leads her to make cakes with remote populations in the world’s most extreme environments. By making sweets with Kenyan tribespeople and Congolese porters, on glaciers across Alaska, with scientists in Antarctica, and behind bars with inmates at LA County State Prison and NYC’s Rikers Correctional Facility, Rose makes big ideas literally digestible. Her work has been featured by NPR, Forbes, and Saveur, and her recent Antarctic short We Become the Place can be viewed at WhiskMeAwayCakes.com.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Mary Woodbury

We’ll begin 2021 on a positive note with a look at the lyrical novel Fauna by Christiane Vadnais. Here, we travel to the Arctic Circle (as indicated by Ursus maritimus), but the novel’s setting is fictional and inspired by places more than it is specifically set anywhere on the map. In my reading, I felt as though I was teleported to a futuristic forest somewhere in northwestern Europe’s Arctic Circle. The author tells me that she was inspired by the atmospheric forests in the Québec province, near the American border. If anything, Fauna invokes a wild imagination, and readers will find themselves anywhere that drips with cold water beneath a wild and dark canopy of trees.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Originally published in French, Fauna was translated to English this year by Pablo Strauss. It is Christiane Vadnais’s first work of fiction and it won the Horizons Imaginaires speculative fiction award, the City of Quebec book award, and it was named one of 2018’s best books by Radio-Canada. From the publisher:

A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species – humans included – are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her. Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.

In a recent article at the Chicago Review of Books, I wrote: “Vadnais’s writing is raw, erotic, and dream-like. She’ll take you deep into the foggy, haunted woods and tantalize you to the core.” Some of my favorite stories have a wildly entertaining and sometimes mysterious landscape at their nucleus, with biology and ecology central to characters’ motives and how plots unfolds. The physical environment of Fauna is so ethereal that it’s entirely palpable.

CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

Before and after Fauna, what has your life been like?

What Fauna changed for me is the way I approach writing. The freedom, the recklessness I felt while writing my first book – not knowing if it would be published – have been replaced by a more conscious work. I demand more from myself. Every day, I sit at my desk with both the desire to understand this weird thing that we do, telling stories, and the feeling that it’s really mysterious. I have a lot to learn about my art, I am at the beginning of a journey: it’s challenging but exciting.

I opened Fauna and didn’t stop reading until the end. It’s that addictive. What led you to write this novel?

The idea came from an article I read about dreams. I am fascinated by their symbolic logic and the way they make us see things differently. The article said that neuroscientists, when they study them, find a lot of people still dreaming about wild animals, about being chased, etc. It seemed strange to me: how can we dream about this, considering that most of us have never seen a bear outside a zoo? Could that be a reminiscence of our animality, a primitive signal sent by our brain to tell us that we are cut from our own materiality? The poetry I saw in this thought inspired me. I wrote what became the first page of Fauna. The book is inhabited by this dreamlike spirit, by a wild imagery, by a desire to be connected with our animal instincts in a positive way.

That’s pretty fascinating. Can you talk some about your thoughts and direction when writing this book? What were your intentions for reader impact?

I wanted to make the reader feel how beautiful and powerful and vivid nature is, even in its darkest moments. For a long time now, we – humans – separated ourselves from nature, thinking that we will always find a way to control it. But we are part of it, for better and for worst. To see it, we don’t have to look far: just see how pregnancy can take over our body, how a parasite can make its nest in our belly, or how we have to manage snowstorms and floods. We are living an ecological crisis due to our arrogance and violence against other species, so I think we need to remember that: we are not everything. We are part of a bigger system, of something powerful and magic. To dilute our ego is a key to engage our civilization in a better relationship with our environment. We should always care about sensitive beings, not because they are pretty or useful but because we share a frail balance, a unique world. That said, I didn’t want to write a political book, but something intimate, poetic, where not only humans would have their place, but also animals and insects and forests. They are all characters in the book.

I thought Fauna was a unique approach to life in a weird, climate-changing future. What is it about eco-horror that appeals to you?

Literature is always written from a particular place and time, and writing about nature today is unfortunately writing from a terrible ecocide. To be honest, I wasn’t conscious I was writing eco-horror while doing it. It came naturally, because this is the world we live in, and also because of this primitive imagery I talked about.

An important motive that links Fauna to the genre of horror is hunger. In the book, bears are hungry, Heather is hungry, Cathy’s mom eats her rabbits… Every life kills another to survive: if this is natural to animals, when it comes to humans, it turns into violence. Their appetite to consume others, to consume the earth, has no end. Since I have been a vegetarian for many years now, this is a striking image for me.

It’s interesting to see a biologist featured in these short, connected stories. In fact, a few of my colleagues have expressed interest in Laura’s role in the story. What inspired this character?

Science is at the same time a figure of progress and a figure of domination. I find this fascinating. It’s the tool we use to injure the Earth (to dig for oil, for example) and the environmental knowledge we need to follow if we want to solve the ecological crisis. I wanted Laura to be solar, to represent the “caring” side of science, but at the same time to embody its failures. Laura’s science is unable to save humanity as we know it. But she tries, and tries, and tries, and shows curiosity for the new forms of life emerging. Laura is a character driven by an intellectual quest, and that’s what I find interesting about her.

Is Shivering Heights and its environment inspired by any particular place? Have you been there?

While I was writing “Diluvium,” the first story, I wanted to create an ambiance of “noir” movie. I thought about the south of Québec province, near the American border, with its dark forests (which inspired a lot of Québec crime writers), and built the world of Shivering Heights from there. I also put in it a great deal of my love for gothic literature and atmospheric movies.

Are you working on anything else at the moment?

I am writing a novella for a collective project, inspired by the French genre of “merveilleux scientifique” (“scientific marvel”) and, at the same time, another dark eco-fiction (I can’t help it!).

Oh, sounds interesting, so I will be following that! Thanks so much, Christiane, for your time and insightful thoughts about your novel.

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

______________________________

Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Biborka Beres

This is the second part of a two-part interview with the Berlin-based visual artist, sculptor and animal liberation activist, Lin May Saeed. You can read Part I here.

You depict and reference both imaginary and real environments in your pieces. There are typical Berlin scenes (for example a punk with a hound, or people promenading with dogs in Nelly-Sachs-Park) along with events and characters from the Bible and Quran. What is the place of your pieces, and what do these places and spaces represent to you? 

Gilgamesh is the oldest known narrative and it begins with a parting of an early man from nature. The beginning of this tale, even before the character of Gilgamesh is introduced, is what has engaged me the most. Grane is a horse from the German Nibelungen legend. I made a paper silhouette about it, in which I tried to depict a specific moment from the perspective of the horse. I am interested in leaving behind the anthropocentric perspective. It is probably not entirely feasible, but it might be possible to at least relativize the human view in favor of animals.

Berlin appears in some of the works because I can imagine so many things in this city. When I moved here in 2001, I saw Berlin as very diverse. As a person with a migration background, I felt I was in the right place. In this city where intercultural coexistence works relatively well, I wonder if another form of interspecies coexistence could take place. I see certain places within the city as spaces of possibility, and these sometimes emerge in my pieces. For example, the relief Asylum/ the Liberation of Animals from Cages VI, from 2009, depicts an interspecies scene in the corporate compound of a Berlin car rental company, Robben & Wientjes, in the neighborhood of Kreuzberg. This site, which does not exist anymore, was a democratic place, known to everyone who moved around in Berlin or wanted to take something from A to B for little money. On the roof of the company building were seal-shaped light boxes serving as the company logo.

However different these fictional and real places are from each other, I am interested in the mental journey through time, following a common thread, the relationship between humans and animals. 

Often we see a mixture of non-Western subjects in Western environments in your works. It seems like animal liberation has a greater connotation to you than lifestyle choices, for example, becoming vegan. You depict a range of social and political issues from social classes or pollution to war in your work. Do you see animal liberation as a subject on its own, or as a piece of the larger whole?

Definitely, animal liberation is part of a larger fight, against climate change and for social equality. It is part of a left-wing movement. To me, veganism feels so self-evident and widespread today that it’s almost pointless to continue to address it directly. In the context of my work, this would be an unnecessary repetition. Also, I don’t necessarily want to link my personal lifestyle to my art practice. I usually try to avoid making direct appeals to the viewer although I certainly have my ambivalences: I like Agitprop and Comic culture, since they tend to be very direct in their statements. It is a constant balancing act; it’s impossible to accomplish everything in a single piece. 

The way I first perceived the relationship between man and nature in a larger context was influenced by the environmental disasters of the 1980s, such as Chernobyl in 1986. This was 1,200 miles from the city where I grew up. People were told to stay at home. I was personally not affected or frightened, but it made me think. Why do we call what animals do natural, and what humans do or make artificial, be it plastic bags or nuclear power? This thinking process turned into an alienation from the concept of humanity and from the results of human labor. Then, there was the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Later, I did a sculptural piece about this, Cleaner/Reiniger, a figure holding an oil-smeared animal in her arms.

There are at least two kinds of humans depicted in your work: cruel, militaristic, and kind, peaceful. Do you see people differently based on how they relate to their environment?

The way people treat weaker creatures such as animals certainly affects how they are perceived by others. To avoid falling into black-and-white thinking, I look at temporal processes of change, and assume that the omnivores of today are possibly the vegans of tomorrow. Whenever someone mentions their meat consumption, I try to keep in mind their freedom to make choices. As for the future, there are several reasons why people would change their attitudes towards animal consumption: they might decide, out of a process of reflection, to live non-violently, i.e., to become vegan. Or they may adapt to new ethical standards embraced by society. Or one day, it may be prohibited by law to eat animals and use them for other purposes. Which of these possibilities will be the reason for shifting to veganism has yet to be seen. The main motive will probably be the fight against the climate crisis… In any case, I expect that the use of animals will end. 

Your use of Styrofoam as material makes me think of functionality with aesthetic purpose. With your sculptures, you create new, organic spaces out of artificial material. Do you see a role for artists in promoting material sustainability as well?

Yes. Art is no more exempt from the necessities of sustainable production than other professions. Styrofoam is an absolute prime example of a material that should simply not be. As I started working in figurative sculpture, it turned out to be the material that allowed me to work in large sizes. Since Styrofoam is imperishable, I considered it suitable for my works, which I hope will outlive me. I use as much found Styrofoam and other found materials as I can get. 

In all other areas of the studio, like art handling, I act as sustainably as I can. I try to minimize air travel or avoid it altogether. When I got a commission for the Skulpturenpark in Köln, I wanted to work with aluminum casting, as it seemed more contemporary and a more adequate translation of Styrofoam pieces. However, after doing some research, I learned that bronze is less environmentally damaging to produce than aluminum. So when I cast outdoor pieces, I work with bronze.  

What’s your relationship with texts, history, and philosophy? On your website, there is a wide selection of texts on animal liberation. 

My homepage is basically one long entry from 2008, which was written shortly after I decided to fully dedicate my work to the human-animal relationship. I have often engaged with theoretical texts in exhibitions too, such as Nagheoleed/Neolith, a lecture by the Italian philosopher Marco Maurizi on the supposed beginning of capitalism in the Neolithic period.

I have included other texts in my exhibitions that I found particularly relevant. For the show at Lulu in Mexico City in 2017, I used an excerpt of an essay by the social scientist and activist Melanie Bujok, that visitors of the exhibition could take home.

In the last exhibition at Jacky Strenz, my gallerist in Frankfurt, Germany, I was able to include a text by Birgit Mütherich, which curator Rob Wiesenberger also published in the catalog for the exhibition Arrival of the Animals at the Clark Art Institute. 

(Top image: Grane, 2013. Cardboard, transparent paper, wood, and fluorescent lights. 128 x 224.5 x 19.68 in. (325 x 570 x 50 cm))

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Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, studying dance, drama, and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for Artists & Climate Change, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices, and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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By Biborka Beres

As a senior at Bennington College and a multimedia performance artist, I have been exploring potential ways to engage with the climate crisis in the arts without succumbing to the danger of creating all too reductive and didactic pieces. One September afternoon, while doing some research for my upcoming senior show – a dance piece about our alienation from nature – I read that an exciting exhibition was showing in the neighboring town. It was Lin May Saeed’s Arrival of the Animals at The Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Seeing the exhibition, I was captivated by the depth and clarity of her call to animal liberation. 

Lin May Saeed is a German sculptor, painter, and visual artist whose work has been exhibited in Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, and the U.S. Through her art, she embeds the issue of animal rights and human-animal coexistence into a deeper frame of how we, humans, treat our environment and each other. Inspired by historical events, mythological and spiritual sources such as the Quran and the Bible, contemporary events and present-day urban spaces, Saeed creates a microcosm of the human-animal imaginary. Through problematizing human greediness and cruelty, which lead us to gobble up natural resources with no end and abuse our “animal brothers,” we arrive at imagining a peaceful state of coexistence between humans and their environment. 

A text excerpt from Saeed’s website illustrates the human cruelty problematized in her work:

What follows is the first part of a two-part interview with the artist about the ecological implications of her dedication to animal liberation, and her vision for the climate should animals “arrive” and take back their territories from human-made destruction. 

Can you tell me more about the origins of your art? How did you come to make work about animal liberation? What made you turn to the topic of injustices towards animals, and their arrival to reclaim the world from humans?

My first idea after graduating from high school was to study stage design. After I had already worked for some time at the theatre in my hometown, Wiesbaden, Germany, in several theatre and opera productions, I went to the Düsseldorf Art Academy to study stage design. In my first year at the Academy, I discovered sculpture, basically by accident. At the same time, I started to deal with issues around animal rights and became active against animal abuse, starting with the topic of fur. Despite my great love for theatre and opera, it became clear that these performative art forms were centered around  man: there are no animals in theatre. 

In contemporary visual arts, the topic of human-animal relations was not so welcome either, but at least it was possible to make work about  it, since in a field like sculpture I could choose my own themes. I was astonished by the works of artists concerned with animal rights at the time, but they often revealed the everyday horror of slaughterhouses and experimental laboratories and I could not imagine depicting cruelty against animals and manifesting it pictorially. Also, animal rights as a positive notion is an abstract concept and I couldn’t imagine what it would look like. 

The injustices towards animals mentioned in your question, especially in their systemic institutionalized forms, were of great concern to me. After initial sculptural attempts in this direction, I found that I would rather use my work to imagine what the ideal treatment of animals might look like. During this time there was also a shift in language: the animal rights movement changed its name to the animal liberation movement. This change opened up a new space of thought for me, and I got an idea about the form in which I could make an artistic contribution. It allowed me to think of images of the liberation of animals.

What role do animals play in your work, and what kind of creatures are they? I noticed that they are both anthropomorphic with their own will and power, but also symbolic of a larger world order. What do animals mean to you?

That is a good question! I face a puzzle when I look at animals. They are so much like “the Other,” especially in man-made, predominantly mono-speciesist urban environments. When I try to grasp the space between me and an animal, something opens up like a journey through time; the space stretches. Being so close to animals, such as those with whom I share my studio, feels fantastic. These are rabbits saved from slaughter, and they rarely appear directly in my work. They are just too perfect, too Disney-like. However, I make observations on them, such as symmetries and perspective foreshortening, which flow into my work. 

About the Seven Sleepers cave installation at the end of your exhibition at The Clark: Is this optimism for the future? What is the significance of sleep and dreaming in your work? Is climate change a nightmare, and climate utopia a sweet dream? 

The narrative of the Seven Sleepers defies plausible interpretation, and the fact that it could not be made subservient to any ideology is perhaps the reason why it has remained largely unknown to Christian-influenced culture. I first learned about the legend when visiting the Seven Sleepers cave close to Amman, Jordan. The fact that the legend is mentioned in the Quran, but not in the Bible, piqued my interest. Also, one of the Seven Sleepers was a dog. These two aspects seem to make it a story that is both trans-religious and trans-species. The blurring of the narrative in the legend made it easier to deal with it sculpturally. This stretched moment of sleep seems to articulate waiting, powerlessness, non-violence, and perhaps a form of silent protest. Sleep seems to me to be an everyday, or rather an all-night “being in another world.” I am less interested in analyzing dreams than in the very opacity of sleep. Dreams are a cross-species phenomenon, as animals also dream. That alone would be enough of a reason for me to not eat animals.

Thank you, Lin.

* * *

In the second part of this interview, we discuss mythical and urban spaces and interspecies utopias, Lin May’s views on animal liberation as part of a larger climate imaginary, and the importance of material sustainability in the arts.

(Top image: Seven Sleepers 2020. Styrofoam, acrylic paint, steel, jute, fabric, paper, plants, glass, water, cotton cord, wood, and cardboard. Overall: 84 5/8 x 177 1/8 x 39 3/8 in. (215 x 450 x 100 cm))

______________________________

Biborka Beres is a senior student at Bennington College in Vermont, studying dance, drama, and philosophy. Her interests and works lie at the intersection of socio-political change and the performing arts. In her interviews for Artists & Climate Change, she is continuing her process of exploring how the arts can create models, practices, and imaginary worlds which allow humans to coexist peacefully with nature and with each other.

———-

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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