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Ripley Whiteside: Depicting wonder
88 Plays9 months ago
Tennessee-based artist Ripley Whiteside creates art as a way to explore and connect to nature, history and speculative ecological futures. In a wide-ranging conversation spanning, contemporary ecological thought, invasive species and an ancient Medieval text—the Augsburg Book of Miracles—the conversation looks at the mysterious constructs of our understanding of nature. His place-based work is inspired by time spent Montreal, North Carolina and his home in Tennessee.
Bio:
Ripley Whiteside was born in 1982 and grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 2012 he graduated with an MFA from SUNY-Buffalo, and he received a BFA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2008. He is a drawer, painter and printmaker, and has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Canada. His work is represented by Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, and Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain in Montreal. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Austin Peay State University, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
This conversation is produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to Plant Kingdom series
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Katherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, writers, and healers.
00:00:33
Speaker
We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature. We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.
Ripley Whiteside's Artistic Journey
00:00:43
Speaker
Today's conversation is with artist Ripley Whiteside.
00:00:47
Speaker
I first met Ripley a decade ago when we were both living in Montreal. I loved reconnecting with him and talking Walden, watercolors, Montreal, climate, exploring cities through dog walking, and his journey from dropping out of agricultural school to art making. He grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He came to his MFA from SUNY Buffalo, and he received a bachelor's of fine arts from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
00:01:14
Speaker
He is a drawer, a painter, a printmaker, and has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the US and Canada. His work is represented by the Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, and Pierre-Francois Ouellette Art in Montreal. He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Austin P. State University and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Here's our conversation.
00:01:44
Speaker
You grew up in Chapel Hill in North Carolina. We talked a little bit about that previously, but was exploring nature and art always part of your childhood or what was your experience of the natural world? I feel like it was. I moved into a house from an apartment with my mom when I was about eight years old and it had a big backyard. It was like a lot that abutted
00:02:11
Speaker
a big gully in the neighborhood so no houses could be built to the left of us. So we had like a quarter mile of woods beside our house. And that ended up being a place where I spent a lot of time, kids in the neighborhood, like diverting the stream with rocks and building forts and doing that. And that was great fun. But then it was when I got a bike was when I really got into exploring and was a
00:02:41
Speaker
suburb that was built not too far away. And for like a few key years of my middle school life, I would go riding around these construction zones, which were tearing down this forest that I otherwise had enjoyed playing in. But for a while it was just like they were kind of opening it up in a way, even though it was destructive. But it somehow in there, in the creation of this neighborhood,
00:03:07
Speaker
We, as the old neighborhood, felt nostalgic for when there was just woods, but it also gave us a path into it that hadn't been there before. But it became like, for a while, it was sort of like it was just ours, with new paths where streets would eventually go were being cut through the woods, and that had an impact.
00:03:28
Speaker
That's so interesting. And when you're a kid too, you just notice things so differently in every field or weedy landscape, like you experience that. That's part of your world. I remember like fields where like the rattlesnakes used to be, or not rattlesnakes, I don't wish, um, garter snakes and everything in my suburban time, which had big development too. But just thinking about all those kinds of non-places are really part of your landscape.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, it felt very quintessential childhood. And then, so even at the moment, I don't know if I was feeling like I was engaging with nature, per se, in a way that I would love to be able to say I was.
Influence of Farm Life on Ripley's Art
00:04:12
Speaker
And when we spoke before, you told me about an uncle you have.
00:04:18
Speaker
Totally. So my mom grew up in Eastern North Carolina and her family, that side of my family, my eternal grandmother's side of the family has been in Eastern North Carolina for a really long time. And so my mom grew up on a farm that is
00:04:34
Speaker
land that has been in the family for generations and my uncle lives there now and it really is a place out of time. It is arduous work and his cultural life is 18th and 19th century literature which it's sort of like the modern world is
00:04:53
Speaker
too much for him. There's enough there from times that were in some ways simpler for him to just be fully be filled up by. He like plays fiddle and flute and raises shape and like reads Longfellow.
00:05:10
Speaker
It's very inspiring, but it's also a life that I, for a while, I was like really taken by the romance of it when I was in high school. And I didn't see, like I loved making art. I loved drawing. I didn't feel like I was very good at it. And I didn't see that being like rear. And so I started college, the idea that I would study agriculture and not live up to this ideal that he had created.
00:05:40
Speaker
But, you know, as I've grown older and gotten to know him better and learn more about it, he leads a very hard life. It's just hard on the body. It doesn't allow you much time to pursue anything else other than fiddle. And he knows this small little spit of land at the end of a long road. Yeah. Sounds very arduous, but yeah, how you live is creating your spiritual practice.
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's pretty much part of it. And he does like, he sells some things at a farmer's market, but mostly he eats what he grows. And it isn't coming from an ideological place either. He's always been really interested in land stewardship and ecology and all of that.
Transition from Agriculture to Art
00:06:28
Speaker
How did you go from agriculture to art? What was that transition?
00:06:32
Speaker
Well, I figured out pretty quickly that agriculture wasn't going to be it. And I had studied that at a small college in the mountains of North Carolina called Warren Wilson College, which is a great, very small kind of radical liberal arts school. There were under a thousand students and it was based around a farm and everyone at this college has a job
00:06:58
Speaker
It felt like summer camp. And I had this job on the farm. That job, it was like coveted. But I wrote an essay about my uncle, and it was viewed with all of that romance. So they put me on the farm, and it was like so much harder than I ever could have imagined. It was eye-opening, and it wasn't that the romance of it. But I, at the same time, was enjoying drawing and taking art classes.
00:07:26
Speaker
I dropped out of school and I just lived and worked for a few years. And that was really important. I think that when I was going into school, felt like the thing that I should do, but I didn't know what I wanted. I needed to get some Willys out, which I did. And then I decided, okay, I can study art.
00:07:48
Speaker
what I feel an affinity with. So I went back to UNC Chapel Hill and embarked on studying art. But yeah, my interest in ecology was still there. It's hard to be in those positions where you have to choose. Disciplines and fields are so broken down and so specific, but it doesn't reflect your interest in them or how you might have experienced them before study and then just go further down those really specific roads.
Exploration of Landscapes in Art
00:08:16
Speaker
And with, so you've studied and have worked in a lot of different places in Buffalo, Chapel Hill, Montreal, Tennessee, and landscape is the area that you work in and is exploring places you live in through landscape. Does that help you engage and understand where you are? What is the kind of connection there?
00:08:44
Speaker
And it's something that I feel like has been a lot more central to my practice at previous times of my life and something I'm actually looking for right now. It's like I had a dog, a real one, and also a buffalo, and that helps. And it can happen now. I just have to look at this.
00:09:04
Speaker
This is a beautiful part of the world. That's another thing that I think I found. All of these parts of the world are beautiful. Even the places that kind of feel like nowhere or everywhere, in all of that, I am finding myself kind of engaging with the space that I'm in now, but also like my neighborhood, the broader neighborhood, it's
00:09:25
Speaker
kind of not very attractive. It's like strip mall after strip mall and vape shops and cell phone businesses. And I've been looking at these places with a sense of inspiration. And I don't quite know what's coming from it, but they're very much a part of my ecological framework now.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah, some of those stories of place and life have been paved over, but they're still there. It makes me think I grew up in this town, Milton, Ontario, which is, it felt very generic. It felt like it could be anywhere in
00:10:02
Speaker
you know, southern Ontario or the states. That's exactly kind of how you described, but it had beautiful, like, it had nice conservation areas. It's a region of the Niagara Escarpment. And then last year, one of this small lake in the Escarpment called Crawford Lake became, like, made the news as being the best
00:10:25
Speaker
marker of the Anthropocene. In the meetings of geologists, they're all battling it out. Where are the sediments the best? Where is the evidence captured the most? It was in this small lake that we had always gone to and hiked around. It's a small, really deep lake, so the sediments don't mix. It has evidence of indigenous agriculture and pollen grains over
00:10:51
Speaker
over centuries, but it has the pollution from the 1950s really marked, and that was just so interesting connecting that big global disaster, the era that we're in to a place. I mean, there's evidence of it across the world, but the geologists chose our life. I feel like I've heard of that. Yeah.
00:11:19
Speaker
like a science story that I... Yeah, it was a few months ago or earlier this year. Yeah, big in the Toronto area news.
Early Projects and Artistic Influences
00:11:30
Speaker
I wanted to talk to you, just ask you a bit about landscape too, or when did your art practice start engaging with nature and landscape, or was that always part of your practice? I was thinking back to like, what was the first project where I was really
00:11:47
Speaker
dealing with nature. When I was an undergrad, I did a project and a class that started out as an assignment for a class, and then it turned into a senior thesis project, and that was a bug collection. And so I played entomologist, but I just went around for, I think, nine months just picking up every dead bug that I found.
00:12:12
Speaker
I got a friend at NC State, which is like the agricultural extension school in North Carolina, and the entomology department was getting rid of bug boxes. So I got 12 of these
00:12:28
Speaker
I think they're like made out of cedar and I got little pins and I mounted all of these bugs that I found. That started though because when I was a little kid, five or six years old, I had a bug collection that was just in that jar and I would get excited about finding bugs in a lampshade or a windowsill or something like that.
00:12:51
Speaker
that project in college where I was given license to pretend I was an ecologist, my task was to deal with the aesthetics of it, basically. That was really liberating. And I think that was also when I read The Row, and I was getting excited about engaging with nature as a private artist.
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. After my first field season, when I was doing ecology and floor surveys, I started to run. It's all very seasonal work and there are just so many. It felt like the first time I'd seen bugs again since being a kid and didn't know what any of them were. And then I
00:13:37
Speaker
I just emailed the Royal Ontario Museum asking like if they needed any help in their entomology collection I spent as like so lucky it felt so fancy going to like the back entrance of the museum and going into the collection. But they let me just sort lots of insect collection. Some of them are from the Arctic and some of them were their beetle collection to
00:14:01
Speaker
Family and that was so much fun but just a different way of looking like the care that it takes to look at the insects and the different parts and you see things you didn't see before and I remember from that time so much like it was so much new visual information everything but just sleeping and dreaming about like the tiger beetles running past you and but yeah the scientific way of
00:14:25
Speaker
observation and care that it takes to go the care that you put into a bug collection or helps you see. And I guess that's similar with, you know, in artwork too when you're looking at a world or creating a world or drawing a world. Yeah, I discovered the work of Mark Dion around that time also. He's an American artist who
00:14:50
Speaker
really has made a career of doing that thing of like playing the scientist as an artist and looking for what he could contribute, kind of looking at that pursuit outside of the scientific method and
00:15:07
Speaker
maybe giving it a healthy dose of anarchy. And he sent some of my favorite projects. One of them is he just took a tree from a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest and built a greenhouse that had fallen down and built a greenhouse around it. And it became this living organism in a really appealing way where it brought people's attention to
00:15:35
Speaker
the functioning of something that otherwise might be overlooked. He also he's cataloged like all of the insects in a museum space or done an exhaustive study of like one square meter of forest floor picking apart every little thing. And I was taken with his work that he was important, putting me on the path that I think I'm still on.
00:16:01
Speaker
even though it's veered into the painting direction. I can see those connections. Just because he's come up already twice in the conversation, Henry David Thoreau was that, what's your experience with his writings and Walden? It really is like an introduction. It's still presented as an introduction to environmentalism and thinking and what's your experience?
00:16:31
Speaker
I loved reading Walden. I think I'd read it in high school, or no, in college. But it was his walking books that I found most inspiring, like Cape Cod, especially. That one I've reread.
00:16:49
Speaker
more recently, and it's almost just a diary, but it's got his appealing style, and it's this look at a place in an ecology that maybe doesn't exist, but he brings it alive in such an important way. Yeah, and he has one about Montreal, a Yankee in Canada, I think it's called.
00:17:12
Speaker
Really? I don't know if he walks, it's not a walk from Walden to Montreal, but it is a long walk and he crosses the border and spends time in Montreal. And that was when I was in my dog walking days when I was really engaged with walking as part of my art practice, which as I'm saying it, I'm like, I should do that more.
00:17:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Montreal Projects and Biblical Themes
00:17:42
Speaker
Well, perfect opening to talk about Montreal. And I think what you said about the dog walking was so interesting too. Like when I go anywhere with my son, he notices such like different things than I do. And then you notice those things, like a lot of small things. And is it the same with a dog?
00:18:02
Speaker
Absolutely. It was such a good experience. So I had a dog that I would walk every day, but also I lived in Montreal, moved away for grad school, and when I came back, I was hoping to get my job back at a bookstore, but I had to wait for somebody else to quit. And so as I was in that limbo period,
00:18:26
Speaker
started working for a dog walking company and would go, you know, it was winter in Montreal and I would have like four dogs. Never more than four, so it was pretty manageable, but I would have four dogs and we would spend the day together.
00:18:42
Speaker
It was like I got to experience this dog world and see what they were seeing. And it was great, very much like you were saying with your son. I was much more attuned to my knee-level perceptions and sounds. And we would go to
00:19:04
Speaker
places that were nice, like the mountain and Lachine Canal, and just sort of walk around and pick up there up after them and try and keep them out of harm's way. But it really did get me thinking about animals, and it was from that experience that I had the idea for the Peaceable Kingdom show, which was a
00:19:28
Speaker
an exhibition that engaged with the animals that live on the island of Montreal. Yeah. Can you introduce us to A Peaceful Kingdom? What was that project? Yeah. So that was an exhibition that I had in 2015 at Pierre-François Ouellette.
00:19:48
Speaker
And it was a show that where I made tableaus of animals. These were like large ink drawings. So the animals were drawn on a one to one scale and they would and all of the animals that I selected.
00:20:04
Speaker
to include were all inhabitants of the island of Montreal. That was sort of the criteria. But it was animals from a range of spaces, not just animals native to the area, but also pets and animals in zoos and animals that would, you know, that we ate. So animals that would come to the island to be turned into meat or animals in laboratories. Just trying to think about this
00:20:30
Speaker
this wide range of animals that, or that kind of constituted the ecosystem and how they were isolated from each other or not. You know, they were living in a human world and in a city and how that was a maybe twisted embodiment of this idea of the peaceable kingdom from, from the Bible. And so there's the, and I think it's, and I'm not, uh,
00:20:57
Speaker
a Christian or a biblical scholar, but I'm like really interested in the stories, the document of the Bible. I had curiously realized it's shown up a lot in my work, but I think it's Isaiah. There's the phrase, the lion lies down with the lamb, and it's talking about the kingdom of heaven.
00:21:18
Speaker
There is no conflict, including the conflict which is inherent to ecology. And I wouldn't even, I don't know if conflict is the right word, but violence maybe. And so there on the island of Montreal, there are all of these animals that, should they have access to each other, violent encounters might occur, but they're all isolated. Many of them are isolated from each other because of us.
00:21:46
Speaker
There's maybe a good encapsulation of this is the Montreal biosphere. Sorry, the biosphere is the zoo, which presents, I think, like five distinct ecosystems, including an Amazon rainforest. And it's such an incredible experience to go there in the middle of winter when it's so cold outside and you have these like automatic doors and you walk into this 85 degrees and there's steam coming out and
00:22:15
Speaker
birds calling, and it's all so completely artificial, but it also has, it's very cleverly so, and everything is kind of disguised. But then also within those environments, there are predators and prey that live in close proximity, but they keep the caimans very well-fed, and so the
00:22:38
Speaker
more missets or whatever that are happy bearers that are sharing that same enclosure are threatened by them. And that felt like a really good metaphor for, you know, everything that had been building up there.
Thriving Weedy Species in Urban Life
00:22:54
Speaker
And then also around that time, I came across the work of
00:22:59
Speaker
Stephen Meyer, he wrote a book called The End of the Wild, and that's where I came across these definitions of different types of species. This is an essay that he wrote in response to the extinction crisis, and it was written in 2006, and he writes about ghost and relic species being on the verge of extinction.
00:23:23
Speaker
would be a relic species and that a ghost species is an animal that is only kept alive outside of its native ecosystems. And that includes like that, a hotel, which is a salamander native to Mexico that has a... Like the external gills.
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And so they are no longer found in the area around, I think it's Mexico City where they're native to, but you can find them in pet stores all over the world. And so this would be like a ghost species in Stephen Meyer's description. And then there was another term for weedy species that really resonated. And those are animals that are
00:24:09
Speaker
able to thrive alongside of humans. And so in Montreal, there would be red-tailed hawks and coyotes and squirrels and rats. But sort of like the wild animals that we end up seeing a lot of would be these weedy species that have figured out a niche copacetic to urban life. Yeah.
00:24:33
Speaker
I guess we are very weedy species. Absolutely. Yeah. The weediest. Resilient, adaptable, hard to get rid of. Disgusting. Yes. I think so many of those animals too. Another thing that's really interesting is that they're invisible. When you think of Montreal, you might think of wildlife of Montreal, you think of
00:25:02
Speaker
Recoons and blue jays and, you know, hawks like those native wild animals where they, you know, by biomass, they're probably a small proportion of what is even, it's probably more cats than foxes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I heard, I think just earlier this week, the statistic that where the 4% of
00:25:26
Speaker
fauna that is not, that is, uh, well, yeah, of, of all the fauna on earth, 4% is considered wild. Is it? Yeah. Like it's mostly cows. Yeah. Yeah. It's uncomfortable. It is. Yeah.
Art Supplies and Historical Methods
00:25:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:43
Speaker
And I guess you were talking about those dynamics and in one of your pieces, there's a caiman and a chicken and I think a chihuahua. What is, can you describe that watercolor and the dynamics at play there and why you chose those animals?
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, that was the, that was the, uh, inceptive piece in the show. That was the first one that I made. And the Chihuahuas there representing my dogs that I was walking every day. I'm not sure where, so the Cayman was from the, um, from the biosphere. And I,
00:26:21
Speaker
I really enjoyed drawing a cayman in my sketchbook, and I felt empowered to make it life-size. So that's a pretty large drawing. And Chihuahua and Chicken are on writing its back. And then there's also a little robin. That one also has tulips in it. And there's Mount Royal in the background. Yeah, the tulips
00:26:47
Speaker
were painted with inks that I made so there's walnut ink throughout but in that piece the tulips are made with onion skin dye and so another facet of this project was an extension of my interest in making my own
00:27:03
Speaker
art supplies when possible. So this included a lot of walnut ink, which luckily I had a surplus of from when I lived in Buffalo. So you started making the dyes in Buffalo? What was that experimentation process like? Where did you find the recipe? Yeah.
00:27:23
Speaker
It was something a friend of mine, a colleague in my cohort had a walnut tree in her yard and had heard about how you can extract the tannins and it's super simple. It's just boiling the husks and then it yields this rich tannin ink and which was a concern for the gallery. They asked a conservationist to
00:27:49
Speaker
kind of do an analysis to make sure that none of these pigments go fugitive. And it turns out this walnut ink is archival and has been like a sepia tone used for centuries, monks were writing with it. So it felt like it was part of a long tradition. And also it's like economical.
00:28:10
Speaker
How many black walnuts do you need to make a gallet? How much were you collecting? Were you just walking the streets with pillowcases full of walnut? How many do you need yet? Probably like a pasta pot, a large pot filled with walnuts and then also filled with water that will yield maybe like
00:28:32
Speaker
a couple of quarts of ink, and I would want to cook it down for a long time to make it thicker and darker. So it's a pretty healthy yield and you can re-boil the nuts if you're running low, but like here they're just absolutely everywhere, especially this time of year. This is when the trees are dropping there, the nuts everywhere.
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I want to talk about one other work from this series. This one was called From a Peaceful Kingdom, Mount Royal, which has, I could identify a turkey vulture, a hawk, a gray squirrel. I took a guess on Google, a golden lion tamarind, a kind of monkey. Yes, exactly. Which are kind of stars at the biosphere. Yeah.
00:29:21
Speaker
the Golden Lion Tamarin and then another kind of Tamarin with, um, it's a black and white little, uh, I don't know if it's very fabulous looking. Yeah. And, uh, so they were favorites of mine from the biosphere. They're like, they're really engaging and curious and one
00:29:44
Speaker
feature of this show was, um, posed all of the animals. So they're making eye contact with the viewer, which is something that these, that the golden lion tamarinds and marmosets in particular at the biosphere, I felt like they did that. Like they were expressing a curiosity about us in a way that was, that stuck with me. And, and also kind of calls attention to the, the,
00:30:11
Speaker
the zoo viewing experience. While we're walking around looking at the animals, they're also looking at us and it is a shared space between species and they kind of, they do have this agency that we
00:30:26
Speaker
have taken most of it away from them. And then there's an art historical corollary with Manet's Olympia, the model, looking back at the viewer. That wasn't as top of mind, but it kind of came up in the process and it felt like it resonated.
00:30:47
Speaker
years ago, maybe it was around this time, this story, it wasn't breaking news, but it was very interesting. There's this young girl, I think she lived in England and she always fed like the crows in her backyard and they had these like neighborhood crows and it had gone on for a long time and they would bring her
00:31:06
Speaker
gifts and shiny things and she had all these collections of what they would give her and she loved taking photos and she had gone out one day like taking photos you know further away from home somewhere else in the neighborhood and had lost her camera lens cap and then it was weeks later the crows had returned it to her.
00:31:28
Speaker
But just that sense of the animals see you and they know you and... Wow. Yeah, it makes me think of that. They're watching back at you.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't gotten deep into it yet, but there's a book called Animal Revolutions that I've recently learned about, and it's very much about how the animals in some cases are rising up, like the orcas that have gone after yachts.
00:32:03
Speaker
And it really isn't like, it's important to remember that it's not our world and these organisms have agency and always like the idea that instead of making like contact with some alien species from a different planet, like we'll figure out how to communicate with animals and
00:32:22
Speaker
I do feel like they, and maybe some of that is actually happening certainly with like whales, but our hubris is definitely showing.
00:32:34
Speaker
But the whale story, it was so appealing, wasn't it? Everybody felt like, yeah, get them. But when you're talking about Stephen Mayors working the different classifications of species, I just made a note, also made me think of this other talk that I went to and just talking about like winners and losers in the climate emergency, but it was
00:32:55
Speaker
An exhibition, Jose Luis Vigante was the curator of it, but it was from the perspective of jellyfish, which will do very well in the climate emergency. It's our catastrophe, but it's not the same for every species.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Somebody will inherit the earth. It might very well be jellyfish, some kind of fungus. The great era of jellyfish and cockroaches, which brings us to the next series I wanted to talk to you about, a more recent one, you know, looking at
00:33:34
Speaker
collapse in emergency or miracles in the book of miracles in that series and can you tell tell me a little bit about about this this work.
Book of Wonders and Environmental Parallels
00:33:44
Speaker
Absolutely. So the Book of Wonders was the title of the show, and it was an exhibition also with Pierre-Francois Willa, and it involved quoting images from this book called the Augsburg Book of Miracles, which was published in the, or not published, but it's an illuminated manuscript from I think the 15th century that I'm like on the spot about it. I don't know if I have, I don't have the
00:34:14
Speaker
I think it is around 1550. 1550, excellent, yes. And so it is a book that describes the
00:34:24
Speaker
It begins by describing the book of revolutions and taking this idea of the historical apocalypse very seriously and going back to stories from the Bible and then kind of taking accounts of signs from God or miracles and describing them as they might have been described by word of mouth or however. So it includes images of like the burning of
00:34:48
Speaker
of Rome and various earthquakes and strange animal encounters and celestial signs, all which had been interpreted as signs from God signaling perhaps the apocalypse and the coming of end days, maybe.
00:35:06
Speaker
And there was like, I've always been interested in printmaking. There was an image that isn't in the Book of Miracles, but that shows up in a lot of prints from the Middle Ages of like an angel delivering the Word of God. And it takes a form of like a face in the corner of the image. And the Word of God is being delivered by usually like a tiny angel or like a little Jesus coming out of the mouth of this figure.
00:35:34
Speaker
And it feels so much like vomiting or that image felt like I could put fire coming out of the mouth. And so that isn't an image that is in this book, but it had been like engaging with artistically, I guess, with this.
00:35:49
Speaker
this era through that way. That was my way in. I feel a little bit embarrassed about how I came across this book in particular. It was like an image that was on a really hip gallery from New York. They put it on their Instagram page for denoting the holidays or something. But it was one of the images from the Book of Miracles describing a sun dog or a perihelia.
00:36:15
Speaker
We know it as a meteorological condition where light is refracted by really high icy clouds in the atmosphere and it creates this bright light on either side of the sun. And I had known them as sun dogs growing up, but during the Renaissance this was something that was
00:36:34
Speaker
wildly abnormal occurrence and considered a sign from God. So that image of three suns just like hit me like a bolt of lightning and it felt like that the greatest depiction of what living on a warmer planet might feel like. So from that point I
00:36:54
Speaker
I got a copy of the book and started pouring through it and felt like I could find correlative images in the modern state of things.
00:37:05
Speaker
Yeah, so each painting in the Book of Wonders exhibition correlates to a specific folio image? Yeah. I think there's over 50 plates, and some of them would be pretty similar to one another. Lots of comets, and lots of some dogs, and some of them are just so wonderful, like a rain of grain in a small town.
00:37:33
Speaker
animals that return to the wild. I love this idea of just the animals on a farm kind of picking up and going back to the woods. Yeah. And that being an event that they're like, we must keep this story for generations to come. Totally. And then I was curious to just kind of try and figure out how to fit
00:38:00
Speaker
stories of modern ecology into these old stories. And so there's four green parrots in the show, and green parrots all over the world, and parrots in general, but will escape captivity and develop colonies, so escape pet stores.
00:38:21
Speaker
find a comfortable life in a city park in Los Angeles or New Orleans. These are cities that have pretty healthy populations of parakeets from Southeast Asia or the Amazon. So that was an example of this kind of an update of the Book of Wonders.
00:38:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's another time again. There's so many extreme weather events. You have changes in constellations in the sky in your series and it feels like we're living in that time with
00:38:57
Speaker
fires and floods and snowstorms being called snowmageddon and everything. But we find, I guess, a different meaning in it. But I think you mentioned one of the works already I wanted to ask you about, which is Wet Bulb.
00:39:12
Speaker
Parahelia, which is kind of an orange, hazy cityscape with three suns in the sky. It made me think a lot about, I mean, you're mentioning wet bulb in your title, a different phenomenon, but made me think so much of the season of forest fires we call Black Summer here in Sydney, whereas this was like, this is our view and I can look at this and I know that it smells like honey and ashes. And that's what it really felt
00:39:42
Speaker
reminded me of, but can you tell us about Wetbulb and in this piece?
00:39:48
Speaker
Yeah, this was one of the first piece that I envisioned for the show. And I read about the wet bulb phenomenon and learned about it in the opening section of Kim Stanley Robinson's book, The Ministry of the Future. And it's one of the most horrific chapters that I've encountered describing
00:40:12
Speaker
a scenario in which humans just cannot survive in the temperature and humidity and it also doesn't feel that removed from where we are and it made the reality of the gravity of the climate crisis that really brought it home.
00:40:31
Speaker
in terms of like survival and how that becomes part of the narrative, not just like preserving the world as we know it, but actually getting through it. And, and so that was, I was very affected by that very specifically. I was thinking about these images of wildfires and here it was, um,
00:40:54
Speaker
It's like September 9th, 2021, when we were all still kind of in quarantine land, but that was when California had its... I mean, these wildfires have been going on, but I remember that day, just like the internet was orange. Everyone was kind of shocked at how
00:41:14
Speaker
our world was all of a sudden irrevocably affected and undeniably so and it felt like a turning point in a way. And I was thinking about this work and the Book of Miracles. Wildfires are also absent in Book of Miracles.
00:41:34
Speaker
which is really interesting. Did they not have forest fires in medieval Europe during that time? Like, is that something like, you know, there's been the fires in Greece, they've been touched now, but that's not a disaster. Yeah, that's so interesting because like maybe it was, uh, they were just kind of accepted as non-events or like we, we have,
00:41:58
Speaker
in this country have this now very tellingly wrong legacy of Smokey the Bear saying only you can prevent forest fires and the effects of widespread fire suppression leading to the development of undergrowth that has
00:42:16
Speaker
fueled some of these fires in ways that if they had just kind of naturally run their course in a forest that wasn't as dense, it might not have been as big a deal. Yeah, as dubious as some of the origins.
00:42:32
Speaker
these events might be like it is a history of medieval Europe environment in a way too. There's this really interesting work that this, she's a climate scientist, her name's Gerald Girgis, she's Australian. Part of her work was looking at the art and photography archives of colonial Australia to put together that environment
00:43:01
Speaker
and climate in the period since colonization, which includes before climate and industrial revolution too. So looking at the archives of museums, at photography of snowstorms in Adelaide or things like that. And that just makes me think of this book. I just hadn't made that connection
Weather Phenomena and Artistic Reflection
00:43:21
Speaker
before. It is a document of natural phenomenon and disaster that dates back to centuries in that land.
00:43:30
Speaker
And you're just updating it, right? Yeah, but but some of the miracles in the Book of Miracles were, you know, like earthquakes. They do show up in the geological record and, you know, they're
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, Vesuvius is in there. Um, don't know about all the, all the children, angels fighting each other to death in the sky, but we weren't there, maybe over hungry and, uh, it says it was observed by many reliable people. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Who's to say?
00:44:11
Speaker
Another work that I wanted to speak to you about, I'm not sure if this is the right pronunciation, derecho. Yeah, derecho. So a derecho was something that I was unfamiliar with. It's a meteorological phenomenon that I didn't know until moving to Nashville. So it's a straight line windstorm that happens in the plains.
00:44:34
Speaker
And so we experienced one here in 2020 and it was wild like that. So it's a it's a line of wind that is coming from like maybe even as far away as Kansas or Colorado or places far to the west but it kind of travels and gains momentum and it is a it's a line of wind
00:44:58
Speaker
kind of sweeping across the landscape, blowing down everything that comes in its path. And it's over really fast, like it comes and goes. And this is a type of storm that I think is more common than I realized. It's like as strong as the tornado, the winds, like it's really
00:45:17
Speaker
It's not quite a tornado, but it's still like 100 plus mile hour winds. Trees get knocked over. People will talk about the directional of 2020 in a way that you will talk about another kind of major storm.
00:45:34
Speaker
And I've experienced hurricanes before in North Carolina and similar to that there's like an eerie green color that the sky becomes right before and swirling strange clouds and then just this like absolute punch of wind that lasts for maybe 15 minutes and then it's over.
00:45:55
Speaker
So I wanted to include that fun new meteorological experience that I learned about. And then in the show, I had changed the title. At some point it was the Rain of Grain. There's another one in the book where it rains pests. It rains flesh sometimes and grain.
00:46:17
Speaker
and insects and blood. Yeah. All sorts of fun things for this guy. So in the show, it's the largest piece in the show. And it's watercolor, but it's not on watercolor paper. It's just on drawing paper. And I created it over the course of a few days. So I would put down
00:46:45
Speaker
an incredible amount of watercolor. And while it was still wet, like I would mix up a quarter gallon of a quart of of color and wash it across the paper. And while it was still wet, I put objects on the paper so that when the watercolor dried, it would the surface tension of the objects would leave an impression of what the object was. And what did you put? Bottle caps, toys? What did you kind of debris yet?
00:47:16
Speaker
Those, yeah, there's an organization that I care and Nashville that I absolutely love. It's a reuse store. And so they have bins and bins of bottle caps and medicine bottles and just kind of lots of plastic. And so they're diverting it from the landfill and people can use it for whatever they
00:47:42
Speaker
use it for. And so besides my own recycling bins, I went there.
00:47:48
Speaker
It's the kinds of things that would be whipped around in the wind too. And like remote controls and packing material and lots of weird small toys. I mean, there's like a horror that comes with it, but I'm just fascinated by how much stuff we produce and kind of where it goes after it is used. It's not something that I feel like I'm not angry about it. It's sort of just like a fact that
00:48:16
Speaker
We're pumping out a whole lot of plastic. And then you have an ocean garbage patch of the Great Southern Gyre of water bottles and sushi, soy sauce, fish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So it feels like it's on its way back to us at some point. And we just don't have the forecast. We literally just bury it.
00:48:45
Speaker
wash it away, wish it away.
Observations on Urban Development
00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Cause you have another work, landfill and earthquake in the series that is about. That one is sort of relates to like the Nashville real estate boom.
00:49:02
Speaker
And in our old neighborhood, which is a very like hip part of town that we started to notice that every time a house went on the market, it would be bought by a developer who would tear that house down. And these are like ranch houses built in the 50s that are probably on a quarter acre lot, maybe half an acre.
00:49:23
Speaker
But it's kind of like your typical suburban house, but these houses would be knocked down and two tall, skinny houses would go in their place. And so the landfill is, those images came from some of these demolition sites right around the corner from where we lived, where perfectly livable house and the material, the amount of material was really overwhelming to me.
00:49:49
Speaker
I was really disturbed by these profit margins that these developers were chasing that seemed so small relative to this house, which I'm sure someone would pay good money to live in. It happened with every single house that went on the market.
00:50:06
Speaker
Yeah, and construction, such a huge carbon footprint. It really is, like all that cement. Yeah, cement is, I've got a different stat, so it's like 8% of emissions or about that, but it's the second after water, it's the second most used material by humans. Wow, that's so amazing. Yeah.
00:50:33
Speaker
Scary, because it feels so permanent. It is like, that is the geological record. Wow. Yeah. Artificial stone. But when you were talking about that too, it just made me think of your, you know, your childhood and exploring those building sites and places opening up.
00:50:56
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I hadn't thought about this in a while, but they're near my mom's house in explorations of the woods. My friends and I came across an abandoned neighborhood, so it's just foundations. So I guess the financing fell through or something, but there were maybe like a dozen houses and even a street light, very like Narnia.
00:51:24
Speaker
that was probably 50 years ago. And so there's, it's, it's really become part of the landscape. It's like hard to see, you know, you don't see it at all at once. And then you realize, Oh, and this is, you know, we're standing on an intersection, but we're in the middle of the woods, but there's like houses over there and, and they're just foundations. The other piece that I wanted to ask you about was Starlink and Burning Torch in the series.
Celestial Phenomena in Modern Art
00:51:50
Speaker
Tell us about, tell us about Starlink.
00:51:53
Speaker
Yeah, in the Book of Miracles, there are all of these celestial signs, so lots of comets and weird eclipse phenomena. And this was at the moment when Starlink entered our common experience, and it feels such—well,
00:52:14
Speaker
It draws attention to this kind of extension of our ecosystem. I find the pursuit of life on Mars and space exploration, I find that to be really disturbing and also really pessimistic.
00:52:30
Speaker
We're not going to figure it out here, and so we should put our energy elsewhere. And I have never seen a Starlink satellite. My dad has. My dad lives kind of out in the country, and he didn't know what it was when he first saw them. And it was around when I quickly was able to
00:52:47
Speaker
figure it out. But still, I feel like it is rare that we have these encounters kind of in a phenomenological way that would be similar to the experiences that these people were having where there would just be this like overwhelming sensory experience and no answer for it. And so you're like looking for an explanation.
00:53:12
Speaker
Just to see it and not know what it is. Yeah i've seen i mean i've just seen star link once because they're really low they're really bright they're brighter than anybody thought they would be and it is just a line of things so many amazing a lot of amazing images of astronomers saying like star linked as their beautiful like nebula pictures are just.
00:53:36
Speaker
transect by the satellites. I used to manage night tours at this beautiful historic observatory where we had PhD students and astronomers connect audiences with the southern sky every night. Very beautiful experience and I think it was with them on one of the meetings that we all went out
00:53:56
Speaker
We had to go cut the meeting because Starlink was going to pass over and to go see it for the first time. Yeah, it's so controversial. I think they have 4,000 satellites or something right now, but are planning for it would like to send 40,000. I loved this work. Space environmentalism is just blowing my mind and I'm so interested in it. To think about space sustainability has been a really interesting way back into thinking about climate and Earth. There's this amazing
00:54:25
Speaker
Camilla Roy, Indigenous astronomer in Australia, Carly Noon, and she writes about, she has this concept that she's developed with Crystal Denatholi, another Indigenous Australian scientist, talking about Spherenelius and just the values that
00:54:42
Speaker
We're just bringing the same values to space to go trash, to go think you can exploit mining resources on the moon or to leave debris and pollute all the satellites. You're just bringing those same values to space, which is really at odds with the indigenous view of space and writing about sky sovereignty and Starlink disrupting
00:55:06
Speaker
constellations and traditional knowledge, because it's just kind of the beginning of more satellites that will be up there. Right. And it's such the colonizing impulse, you know. Yes. It's there and so let's...
00:55:23
Speaker
because we can or yeah. Yeah. And it feels like it's, um, yeah, it really lacks foresight. Yeah. Yeah. They're finite resources. Even, um, radio frequencies are a finite resource and wealthy countries already own them. Like thinking about physical things or not tangible things in that same way as resource like orbits.
00:55:47
Speaker
has just been really expansive and breaking apart that very Western science way ahead of being like, here's the sphere of ecology and biology and here's the study of the stars and the study of that. It breaks a lot of that open for me.
00:56:04
Speaker
Which isn't true because Book of Miracles too, like it's equating everything, right? All the celestial phenomena is presented in the same way as droughts and plagues. What's the burning torch? Which is the one that is correlated with Starlink in your work and appears quite a few times in Book of Miracles.
00:56:30
Speaker
Oh, that is also, I think that, so I saw one, I think it's a comet, but there's also like a pillar of light phenomenon, which I actually saw at dawn two days ago. I have a really long commute and I have to get up and I see the sunrise every morning from my,
00:56:53
Speaker
my car. I think that it is just a break in the clouds as the sun is rising and it creates this vertical pillar of light. And so that also might be the burning log, but it might be a type of a comet. That one I'm not sure about. Yeah, it's drawn exactly as a stick on fire, falling in the sky in the
00:57:20
Speaker
And it's on the cover of the book. There's others and there's other comments that are shown as like an arm with a sword. Many times.
00:57:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't know if that has some kind of roots in a mythological story. I should know more about that. I feel like I don't have a concise answer. It's not coming up every day in your life. I'm afraid I've been looking for burning swords in this guy.
00:57:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's climate emergency is a disaster that we've caused and we're really this morally challenged and technologically challenged period trying to navigate through that and seeing meanings and attributing climate to or to not to the disasters.
Mystical Nature and Spirituality
00:58:11
Speaker
And it's interesting to translate what that work meant when it was created in the 1550s to how we're looking at the world again.
00:58:20
Speaker
Yeah. And that was a time of such incredible change across the board, like the growth of cities in Europe and technology. I find myself taken aback at how much is happening in the world right now and how fast things seem to be changing. And so that that's front of mind also.
00:58:43
Speaker
Starlink is a good example of that that came about very recently and has had the impact and knowingly. I made a note from one of our previous conversations that you said that as you get older, you're more interested in the mystical in nature. What did you mean by that? Can you elaborate?
00:59:05
Speaker
I think it's precisely what we're just talking about, that natural world does offer mystery, and that's something that I find inspiring. And it's like mystery on lots of different levels, even just physical manifestations of
00:59:25
Speaker
things grow above and below the ground and there's things that the ecosystem extends like to all aspects of our lives and as I've like in the past five or six years maybe I've like
00:59:42
Speaker
I was in a relationship with a pretty hardcore atheist for a long time and I found myself ascribing to accepting the world without a spiritual dimension at all.
00:59:56
Speaker
I think another thing that goes back to the Peaceable Kingdom series is that I didn't mention earlier, but those paintings were inspired drawings. They were inspired by the paintings of Edward Hicks, who was a Quaker preacher who painted that scene in the Bible of the lion lying down with the lamb. He kind of painted that ad nauseam. He made
01:00:18
Speaker
at least 60 versions of that painting, and he was self-taught, and they're great. They're iconic early American folk art. And I was raised in the Quaker meeting. My mom is a Quaker, and so when that relationship ended, I found myself going back to Quaker meeting, and just for the comfort of it initially.
01:00:42
Speaker
I had to contest it since I bought a house and have lots of projects to do. I haven't been, so that's been over six months now. But I do find that practice to be important and inspiring. And when I go, I feel very much reset.
01:01:01
Speaker
And it is the sense of community. It's like God is in the people. It's like something that we make, maybe. And the Quakers do it better than anybody else that I've encountered. I think it's a really wholesome practice.
01:01:21
Speaker
without any dogma involved. It's great. And that makes me think of your, I mean, I don't know if it's a quaker makes me think of your uncle again, but just like even, you know, art making is personal spirituality for a lot of artists too. And finding your own
01:01:40
Speaker
meaning and how you relate to the world through all the different ways i wanted to talk to you about your garden to which seems like feeding is part of
Personal Gardening and Environmental Stewardship
01:01:49
Speaker
this. Conversation to be acting care and attention and nurture tell me about your garden plans.
01:01:57
Speaker
Oh, it's so much fun. It's like, that's where I've been instead of Quaker meeting on Sunday mornings, like guaranteed. So we have a house with about half an acre. It's on a half acre lot and most of it is a really big backyard that was well
01:02:14
Speaker
landscape by the previous owners. So there's some fruit trees and a building that I think is, as far as we can tell, it's the oldest building in the neighborhood. It's like this garden shed back there that's, yeah, it's over 150 years old probably. And it's just like an old shed, but it feels really special that it has just stayed there.
01:02:39
Speaker
And then our tasks, well, they had done kind of a beautiful job of creating a space back here. The couple that had lived here hadn't done anything in the backyard for quite a few years. So this summer has been a task of just sort of like figuring out where things might get planted. So there's a nice
01:03:00
Speaker
vegetable garden plot now and some places for flowers. And there are already a half a dozen mature trees in the backyard, but we're going to be getting some more. And I feel like having a garden as part of it, but also like nurturing a little bit of forest.
01:03:17
Speaker
even though it's a tiny little area, is I think a really fun prospect. And also like, yeah, we've got this yard, we get to do something with it. This little corner of the world gets to, we get to make these calls and that's very, it feels like a really good.
01:03:36
Speaker
Pursuit and and I love doing it and and also it's like a great way to experiment and and it's like Totally a new I feel so new at it. I want to be I want to know what I'm doing but I know that I'm gonna have to mess up a lot in between now and then and I already have
01:04:07
Speaker
That was my conversation earlier this year with artist Ripley Whiteside.
Conclusion and Farewell
01:04:11
Speaker
Thank you for listening and huge thank you to Ripley for sharing his work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Bolts. We have production support by Max Murch and our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us where we get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
01:04:49
Speaker
you