FALL 2020
During the Fall 2020 iteration of Art & Ecology, students engaged within the boundaries of a global pandemic through COVID safe practices outdoors and over Zoom lectures. Closer to home, student’s journaled amongst WWU’s largest sequoia tree with Prof Stan Tag, listened & identified the calls of marine birds at Blaine Marine Park with Prof. John Bower, and experimented with sound installation in an alley of downtown Bellingham with Prof. Sasha Petrenko and her Intermedia class. Across varied times & spaces over Zoom, Art & Ecology students were able to dive into the broad and interdisciplinary subject of eco-art practice through lectures from scholars and artists: Iván Espinosa, Andrzej Kozlowski, and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti. Despite the challenges during this time, these guests supported the student’s curiosities through-and-through.
Below you will find information about visitors from within and outside WWU in Fall 2020 followed by media highlighting those interactions.
Visiting Artists and Scholars
Click on the visiting scholar you would like to learn more about or simply scroll down the page to explore the whole roster of these amazing people.
Stan Tag
Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies
John Bower
Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies
Andrzej Kozlowski
Soundscape recordist for Future Ecologies
Iván Espinosa
Choreographer, experimental dance artist, and co-founder of Salish Sea Butoh
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, PhD
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, UBC
Sasha Petrenko
Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Media, WWU
Stan Tag
Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies
https://fairhaven.wwu.edu/tags
Stan Tag teaches courses at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University in creative writing, literature, journaling, words, punctuation, growing up, maps, animals, trees, weather, natural history, walking, and space, place, and imagination. In 2014, he was a member of the 150th Thoreau-Wabanaki Canoe journey retracing Thoreau’s 1857 trip through the Maine woods with Joe Polis and Edward Hoar. He is the co-editor of Father Nature: Fathers as Guides to the Natural World (2003), has contributed chapters to Henry David Thoreau in Context (2017) and Rediscovering the Maine Woods (2019), and is currently writing a book on the history of the early women’s ascents of Katahdin, Maine’s great mountain. Stan’s photographs can be found on Instagram @stanthebeardedman.
On a sunny September day among the Douglas Firs and Big Leaf Maples, Stan Tag shared a few of his personal journals from a decades-long practice. Often lightly washed with watercolors, Stan’s journal pages inspired students to explore various elements of journaling such as: daily logging and reflecting, map-making, collaging pictures of loved-ones and adventures, researching famous figures and various topics, and creating lists of observations and questions. Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Words are signs of natural facts,” Stan facilitated a discussion around the etymology of the words art, ecology, and journal to spark a deeper understanding of the world around us through the words we use. After teaching us that the root of jour from journal is “day” which drives from the Proto-Indo European root dyeu which means “to shine”, Stan guided us to create a sensory list of all that we noticed that shined around us. He also asked us to reflect what shines in your own life? or what do you wish to shine? Below, you can find photos of student’s Commonplace Books filled with the drawings and lists created during Stan’s class visit.
John Bower
Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies
https://fairhaven.wwu.edu/jbower
John Bower has spent 25 years studying the natural world. Bower’s research includes acoustic communication in bowhead whales and song sparrows, as well as population ecology of Pacific Northwest marine birds. Most recently, John and his family lived on Isla Robinson Crusoe, 500 miles off the coast of Chile, where he studied competition for flowers between the endangered and endemic Juan Fernandez firecrown hummingbird and the green firecrown, a recent arrival from the South American mainland.
At Blaine Marine Park, on traditional lands of the Coast Salish, Semiahmoo, and W̱SÁNEĆ, the Art & Ecology students gathered for a field trip with John Bower for an afternoon of marine birdwatching. John passionately shared his knowledge of the Salish Sea’s intertidal habitat while simultaneously pointing in every direction identifying various marine birds passing by. With the help of Art & Ecology student and birder Rachel Rothberg, Rachel documented in their Commonplace book the birds we saw that day: Canadian Geese, American Wigeons, Mallard Ducks, Northern Pintails, Surf Scoters, White-winged Scoters, a Pied-billed Grebe, Horned Grebes, Western Grebes, Rock Pigeons, Black Turnstones, a Greater Yellowleg, Mew Gulls, Ring-billed Gulls, Glaucous-winged Gulls, Common Loons, Pelagic Cormorants, Double-crested Cormorant, Great Blue Herons, and a Bald Eagle. Watch a video of our birding adventures below.
Andrzej Kozlowski
Soundscape recordist and founder of Half Wild
Andrzej is a soundscape recordist, songwriter, and naturalist. He is founder of the blog and concert series, Half Wild. Andrzej has worked in conservation for The Nature Conservancy, WWF, Rare, and other nonprofits, and founded Paragon Philanthropy in 2012 to support global grantmaking.
Joining us over Zoom, Andrzej introduced basic sound equipment to the Art & Ecology students, providing steppingstones to a new medium for many of the students – soundscape art. Alongside sharing his experience in the field, the dos and don’ts, he shared a couple of his sound pieces – a wolf howl in the old growth forest of Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park, a dawn chorus in a Sierra wetland, and a babbling brook in the French Alps. You can hear these sound recordings and Andrzej’s reflections on the power of amplifying sounds we may not hear otherwise in the video below.
Iván Espinosa
Co-founder of Salish Sea Butoh
https://www.salishseabutoh.com/
Iván Espinosa is a choreographer and experimental dance artist based in the Pacific Northwest. Iván holds a Master of Arts degree in Performance Studies from New York University’s highly esteemed Tisch School of the Arts, where he published numerous essays connecting the fields of sound studies, mycology and environmental philosophy with avant-garde dance practices from the 20th century. As a choreographer of both stage performance and installation art, Iván’s work explores the human body’s connection to the Earth’s Landscapes — and how the intelligence and sentience of plant and fungal bodies can be experienced in live performance. Primarily inspired by his studies of Deep Ecology, Acoustic Ecology, Eco-Feminism, and experimental dance, Iván’s choreographies attempt to challenge Western constructions of time, space, spectatorship, and corporeality. The choreography, aesthetics and artistic methodologies of Iván’s performances are highly influenced and informed by his fervent explorations of Japanese Butoh.
Alongside images of mycelial networks, sculptures made of fungal colonies, and video clips of Iván Espinosa’s dance performances, Iván enthusiastically shared his passion for connecting with the more than human world through the utilization of mycology, sculpture, sound, and Butoh. Iván engages participants five senses through these avenues to intimately connect and commune with nature and the realm of mycelium. For example, Iván utilizes the dance form Butoh to challenge us to engage with space in non-normative ways – rolling, slithering, as a means to open ourselves up to the world in radically different ways.
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, PhD
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, University of British Columbia
A scholar of education for social change, Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, brings an important humanistic and social justice dimension to arts education. Dr. Andreotti’s work “conceptualizes education as an expansion of frames of reference and of fields of signification with a view to expanding possibilities for ethical solidarities.” https://pwias.ubc.ca/community/vanessa-andreotti/
With the Art & Ecology class, Dr. Andreotti introduced Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, an arts/research collective that explores “different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.” https://decolonialfutures.net/ Watch a snippet of her talk in which she defines the methodology Creative Social Cartographies as, “a way of mapping social phenomena using metaphors,” and images that communicate complex ideas. Dr. Andreotti also detailed how the collective layers realities as a means of digging deeper and relating wider, which guided students to think about how we can conceptualize our entanglements with the more than human world and how art can activate this capacity.
Sasha Petrenko
Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Media at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
https://www.sashapetrenko.org/
Sasha Petrenko is an interdisciplinary artist and Artistic Director of The New Urban Naturalists. Her work utilizes sculpture, performance, social practice and new media to draw parallels between ecology and human relationships. Currently Sasha is developing an ecological rock opera combining interactive sound installations, live musical performance, dance and video projections. Petrenko’s projects have been featured widely at national and international venues including the Watermill Center for Performance in New York, Kebbel Villa in Schwandorf, Germany, Kulturfolger in Zurich Switzerland, the Los Angeles County Arboretum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Sonoma State University, Southern Exposure, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
The Fall 2020 Art & Ecology students teamed up with Sasha’s ART 335 Intermedia class to create outdoor sound installations that took place in downtown Bellingham during the pandemic, allowing a rare opportunity for students to interact with one another and the public with a live event. Students from the two classes collaborated on Habitat teams: Marine/Kelp Forest, Intertidal, River/Estuary, Forest/Meadow, and Alpine/Subalpine. For Art & Ecology students this was an opportunity to reflect on the acoustic environments of their organisms. Habitat teams made field recordings, collected sample sound files, and some added their own voices, to create their final sound art pieces. As a sound artist, Sasha guided and curated Habitat in Sound, which was broadcast from speakers installed on the exterior of Mindport Gallery. In addition, Art & Ecology students’ installed sound components into their Sensory Suitcases and interacted with the public, inviting conversations about their organisms and habitats. The SPARK Museum housed a few student’s suitcases in their display window in 2021, continuing engagement with Sensory Suitcase even after course wrapped up. Explore this multi-sensory project in the gallery and sound link below.
The forest
By Sophia Lindstrom, Fall 2020
The forest grows above (and below) How may a forest grow
The moss so moist, the tree so tall
One and The same
Even if you don’t think so
They both take nutrient that distributes between all Sharing between all
Be more about the forest. So, we can all grow above (and below)
This website is made possible by the support of WWU’s Sustainability, Equity, & Justice Fund.
Art & Ecology course developed by Professor Cynthia Camlin.
Website designed by Mouse Bird Studios & edited by Emma Parkinson. © 2020