Feeling with Color

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. This quarter (Winter 2019) the group is reading excerpts from Sharing the earth: An international environmental justice reader (Ammons and Modhumita, eds) and Between the Heart and the Land: Entre el corazón y la tierra (Cardenas and Vázquez, eds.). The following entry reflects the group’s discussion last week.

Feeling with Color

By:  Lauren, Baylie, Emily, and Annika

 

When we read a story, how we feel and what we picture as we read influence our interpretations. As children, we are encouraged to use these feelings and images to create new stories, to use the parts that made us happy as fuel for more happiness, and the parts that made us sad as fuel for more sadness. As adults, we do the same. The only difference is that (if you reside in the world of academia) we are no longer encouraged to use imagination and a plethora of mediums to portray our feelings, but instead are limited to use of intellectual language and conversation.   

We decided to push these boundaries. We know that reading and processing literature about environmental injustice, and social justice in general, can be an experience that is difficult to express using words. Sometimes the use of only words becomes limiting, and we find that the emotions felt throughout our bodies as we read is hard to describe, and hard to pinpoint. All of these things influenced our decision to encourage our classmates to use paint on a page as a medium of expression.

Our main idea was to find and utilize the colors that we felt, in our bodies, as we read our poems.  And then to put them on a page, with no limits to expression. Above are the paintings we received.

One of the most interesting things about this activity was the pause to create. When we first gave instructions to “Paint whatever colors you feel”, we were met with blank stares and silence. As we are all college age and above, we haven’t been told to paint whatever we please, however we want to express it, since elementary school (aka years and years ago). We’ve all fallen out of the ease that we may have felt with similar activities. Eventually the flow returned, as no one really, truly forgets how to dip their fingers in paint.

Though there was a beginning pause to create, in the discussion at the end it was clear this activity taught us all something we needed to re-learn: the importance of expression through art.

One of the first responses in the post-art discussion was the reflection about the ability of art to remove the knee-jerk reaction that we have when we first read. We have opinions automatically. But through art we learn to process, to read lines differently, to wonder why they make us feel a certain way. There is no space for quick decisions. It is thought provoking and gives us opportunity build on our initial opinion and make it into one with more depth and breadth.

 

Not only does it give us time to reflect, but art bridges almost every divide. It opens a door for those who speak different languages, who have different beliefs, different privileges, different struggles, to empathize with those who are removed from them. There are no limits to who sees and understands art, it reaches every demographic. With billboards, graffiti, statues, posters, we can show the unique struggles that those with privilege do not experience. We can show them and make them feel it in their heart, because images speak louder than words. We must confront what we see. We can’t help but feel the things we see with our eyes, deep, deep inside of our hearts. It is no longer just a word on a page, it is a tangible, relatable, thing.

The poems we chose were from the two different books of poetry. The first three poems were from the book Sharing the Earth. The poems were titled “Love Canal” by Janice Mirikitani, “For the Record” by Adrienne Rich, and “Dying Back” by Marilou Awiakta. The next two poems were gathered from Between the Heart and the Land and were titled “Green House” by Aide Rodriguez and “Olive” by Lorraine Mejia-Green.

 

 

 

Ammons, E., & Roy, Modhumita. (2015). Sharing the earth: An international environmental justice reader. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

Cardenas, B., & Vázquez Paz, J. (2001). Between the Heart and the Land: Entre el corazón y la tierra. Berkley, California: Small Press Distribution.