Thinking Like A Forest
On the art of uncivilisation
Here is the editorial I wrote for the current Dark Mountain: Issue 28 on ‘uncivilised art’. The book is a full colour, full on retrospective of the kind of artwork I have been happily curating for the last 12 years, and of the people whose practices reflect the beauty and ruin of a planet in peril. With paintings by the Canadian activist and artist, Kyle Schuermann.
Salmonberries by Kyle Scheurmann (for Dark Mountain: Issue 28 - Uncivilised Art
THERE IS AN EXERCISE at the start of Dark Mountain gatherings called ‘Thinking like a Forest’. The title comes from the collaborative work of activist and artist Jay Jordan. We stand together, feet rooted in the earth, arms stretched to the sky, hearts beating. We are people in different territories, isolated in artificial worlds, but in our canopied imagination, in the mycorrhizal networks beneath our feet, we are connected.
This spring a team of editors set out to create a collection of visual art that would act as a retrospective, a catalogue of the many genres our books have showcased since 2010: photography, illustration, graphic literature, calligraphy, painting, sculpture, land-based artworks, making, installation, ritual and performance. We wanted it to be a celebration of the artists who hold out for a certain way of being in this collapsing world: true to the transformative power of creativity, to the love of the Earth, and the material of life itself.
Civilisation holds us tightly in its unkind embrace, not only because it ‘controls the narrative’, but also because it manufactures the images that distract and misinform us, that keep us looking at the shiny surfaces we feel is our cultural reality. What happens when you uncivilise your gaze, shift your attention away from a perception of the world curated by Empire towards one co-created with all planetary beings who dwell in deep time? What happens when you follow the artists as they span dimensions across time and space, throw wild seeds into monocultures, move through the land, disturbing and liberating our vision?
Their work remembers the tracks the ancestors made in the beginning, how we should walk this Earth. And when the rational world becomes increasingly incoherent and closed, so it is that the artists come with their intelligence and their wit, their delicate brushstrokes, the rivermud under their fingernails, their masks and their surprise, to open the door and bring us home.
This book has the shape and dynamic of a tree. You step out into the canopy, along a walkway, to get a feel of the forest, what is at play on the edges of time. You follow the lines of certain branches: that take you back in time to the illuminated scripts of the parchment maker and the visionary, or down into the underbelly of civilisation where women fall into holes, subvert road signs, throw paint, walk across mined land, who listen to the stones. Bear witness to ruin and beauty.
In the heartwood, there is an archway of Sussex hazel that leads you towards the dismembered forests of British Columbia, recorded in brilliantly-coloured canvases mixed with the ashes of hemlock and cedar. Descending the trunk you encounter the axis for all the artists gathered here: the practices that grant them the rigour to reflect the world’s unravelling, to forge new connections and divergences for life – with ink, talisman, clouds, rainwater, rock, their own human bodies. The roots explore this emergent mycelial work: in collaborations with lichen, with microbes, with stalks of wheat, mountain slate and crow; in the studio which is a darkroom, and also a cliff, a river, a desk before a luminous window.
Finally, among the composting leaves of all our pasts, you discover the seeds: marks on a broken ostrich shell, the earliest known decorative art from Africa; the figure of John Berger beckoning us towards the stony dark where Neolithic artists first began their illuminative work. A seed is a capsule of time, holding both ancestral knowledge and a vision for the future. Nurtured in the depths of ourselves, in the earth, it creates the tree, and then the forest.
Our path ends with a river, a water dragon in Australia.
Every step can reveal the prayer rug we walk upon, and every mark on the new map gives country back to itself.
It begins with an opening in a glade, a dance of invisible forms, and a fox-man in the English borderlands, moving downstream. We follow his watery track…
Spring Studio by Kyle Schuerman (Dark Mountain: Issue 28)
You can buy copy of our current issue from the Dark Mountain online shop here.