I had a routine at the beginning of the lockdown, when I was alone in my Brooklyn apartment. Every morning before work, I would curl up in a bucket chair in the brightest corner of my room, armed with a cup of tea and a piece of knitting or hand-sewing, and listen to The Daily.
Listening to The Daily is not that exciting, and it had been on my podcast rotation for a while. But in late March, instead of listening to miscellaneous news from a walk through Prospect Park or a subway car, it was half an hour of increasingly alarming pandemic content... from my bucket chair... in my room... every day. It was important to me that I stay informed, but I was already feeling my nerves fray from the sheer amount of information being thrown at us all the time. For me, the simple action of making something calmed me down enough to stay present and productively listen to my daily news allotment instead of spiraling into a ball of stress. I would often journal right after to help me process what I had heard.
I repeated that routine this morning for the first time in a long time, with More Perfect's rerelease of an episode to honor the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Knitting has been known to reduce stress levels for a long time, as measured by reported experience as well as lowered blood pressure, heart rates, and cortisol levels. Studies have also shown benefits for those struggling with chronic pain and eating disorders. The tasks I choose for stressful-listening-time are always knitting-like in that they are repetitive in nature and involve execution of a prior plan (or no plan). However, although it may seem mindless, there is micro problem-solving in every stitch on an almost subconscious level. No matter how powerless I feel about everything else going on in the world, I have done something when that half hour is up --- and so maybe I can do something else.
I wrote in my last post about how I used my time at Art Farm last month to re-focus my energy and re-educate myself about the climate crisis. Like my morning news routine, I did this by channeling the stress and guilt and fear that would otherwise hold me back from fully listening to physical making. Instead of half and hour in the morning with a tiny bit of knitting, on the farm I could do hours and days of listening to audiobooks while working in my studio. Instead of a few lines of journaling to post-process what I learned, the themes and information from what I was listening to naturally found their way into my studio work. A lot of those pieces were not mindless accompaniments to the material, but silent meditations in the days afterward.
I don't make art about climate and waste because I think it will change the world. I know that it won't, and I know that it is not enough. I'm pretty sure there aren't any oil execs or powerful government actors reading my blog.
I do it because physical making is a tool that helps me engage with difficult subjects on a meaningful level, and that engagement is a critical step toward greater action. In a time of overlapping public health, environmental, and political catastrophe, I'll take all the help I can get.
The Climate Pieces
Note: Since I work with waste materials there has been an undertone of climate themes in the things I make for a while. It is more overt in these pieces, which were all made at Art Farm.
Everything Was Once Ocean
This piece was installed while in residence at Art Farm Nebraska, using discarded lobster rope sourced from a transfer station in Maine and a found sculpture on Art Farm's property.
100 million years ago, Nebraska was underwater. It formed part of the seabed of the Western Interior Seaway, which split North America in two: Larimidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. Today's rolling plains were home to fish, mollusks, sharks, and dinosaurs. Although the seaway was closed off by mountain building at the end of the Cretaceous period, we have still managed to overfish its waters: The life forms in the periodically anoxic sea formed many of the carbon-rich deposits in and around Texas that feed America's extractive industries to this day.
Nebraska does not contain any of the 8 American cities predicted to disappear underwater by 2100, but the state is facing other urgent climatic threats including hotter and drier summers, intense rainstorms, and increased flooding.
One day everything will be ocean again.
Thwaites
The Thwaites Glacier, sometimes referred to as the 'Doomsday Glacier,' is one of the largest and most rapidly retreating glaciers in Antarctica. Thwaites loses nearly 90 billion tons of ice per year, an amount so significant that it has altered the gravitational pull of the region. A Thwaites could lead to the destabilization of surrounding glaciers resulting in 11 feet of sea level rise.
This apron depicts the phenomenon leading to the destabilization of the glacier, wherein water that is warmer than freezing is pushed up onto the continental shelf, makes contact with the bottom of the ice sheet, and rapidly thins the ice from below, leading to retreat.
The apron is made of material from discarded umbrellas collected from the gutters of NYC - more on that here. The message is not subtle: it's time to get to work.
See ThwaitesGlacier.org for more information. The image I quilted onto the pocket is adapted from their figures.
Fish
In 2017, the UN reported that there were over 51 trillion microplastic particles in the ocean: the origin of the oft-cited "more plastic than fish by 2050" estimate. Microplastics, the result of larger pieces of plastic breaking down over time, have been found in the arctic, Antarctica, and in the deepest parts of the ocean. We have known that sea life have been ingesting these particles for a while, and a 2020 study detected plastics in 47 human organ samples too (every sample studied). The specific health effects on humans require further study, but we know these particles are leaching pigments, flame retardants, UV stabilizers and more. Plastic pollution also wreaks havoc on the marine environment in general, including interfering with oxygen production of the ocean's most abundant photosynthetic bacteria. The apron is made of material from discarded umbrellas collected from the gutters of NYC (more on that here), as well as some miscellaneous plastic waste. The message is not subtle: it's time to get to work.
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