Frances Grimshaw & Sarah Moore: 20 - 29 January, 2023
Sarah Moore is an artist and community worker living in Mparntwe on Central Arrernte land. Frances Grimshaw is a geographer and poet living on Wurundjeri Country. Sarah and Frances used their residency to make an mixtape, using Val's work to think through the idea of romancing nature.
Sarah and Frances in the secret garden (Clancy Walker, 2023)
Our main focus during the residency was collecting sounds and stories for an audio piece: Plumwood Mountain Tapes: Romance, Shadow and the More-than Human. A mix of field recordings, music, poetry and discussion, it’s a gentle musing on how a practice of romance might help us humans orient ourselves to the uncomfortable shadow places and the more-than-human world. In a way this audio piece is a reflection of our friendship meeting the presence of the mountain (and all the non-human beings there).
Here is an excerpt from the mixtape, where we consider what a practice of romance looks like:
To us, romance is a practice rather than an experience that ‘happens’ to you. To us, romance isn’t about ‘falling’ in love but choosing to love. We believe we have discernment and agency over our romantic practice and experience of love.
Romance is awareness and witnessing what is and what could be.
Romance is re-materializing spirit because the real world is enough. We recognise the materiality of other earthly beings.
This romance is mutual nourishment or reciprocity. An openness to affecting and being affected.
This romance welcomes creativity, imagination, fantasy, childishness and a touch of anthropomorphism. These are pillars of empathy because love is “the will to extend oneself’ (Erich Fromm).
This romance embraces both science and art as creative modes.
This romance helps us be tender towards place harm.
We also used different creative processes to engage with Plumwood's concept of shadow places. Sarah made a collection of shadow prints, also known as "cyanotypes", using photo negatives and the power of the sun to develop prints (see enclosed example). Some of these negatives were from photos taken at Plumwood, as well as from photos taken at an example of a "shadow place", an abandoned stone quarry site on a mountain on Arrernte Country. This print-making process is a slow and meditative way of engaging the places represented in the images. Using this photography process to make images of a forest and also a stone quarry meant they were both cast in the same blue tones which give them a nostalgic or melancholic feeling.
Cyanotype (Sarah Moore, 2023)
We also did writing exercises where we wrote poems from the perspective of shadow places, below is an example by Frances, which was included in the audio piece.
Housing estate: Tonight the wind is throwing rain in all directions. It came this afternoon and made the yellow-shirted men and their radios scuttle back into their utes and leave. This is the most rain we've seen since our foundations were laid. It's filling up the lake and spilling over; turning fields into bogs. Our freshly laid lawn is soaked through, lifting up. Today, like yesterday and the day before, we were left half-made and unclothed. The yellow men tried to cover us up in sheer white plastic to protect us from the elements, but the wind flung it against the temporary metal fencing. Now it's pressed against the metal grating and flapping in the wind. The metal fencing will be gone soon, along with the piles of rubble and yellow-shirted men. Soon the land-body will be divided up by wooden panels, obscuring our view of each other. Soon there will be road signs and Subaru Foresters and SLURPEE cups in the stormwater drains. Soon we will be clad and filled with furniture and bodies, made into something other than ourselves. Made homes. But for now we stand as hollow frames, future ghosts. Tall and roofless and beautiful. We are giddy with water and weather. We stretch our bare bones to the rain and swallow it.
Mist on the mountain (Frances Grimshaw, 2023)
Excerpt from Fran's journal:
Val’s handbuilt octagonal house sits on the top of a mountain facing the sea. Fairy wrens hang out in the ferns, their songs hang like little bells, light against the low hum of the wind. Fire-damaged trees have patchy leaves, they stand tall, looming silhouettes through heavy fog. The frogs croak all day long. I wrote in my journal that "words like romance and capitalism feel silly, hollow, thin" in the face of the thick sentience of the mountain.
Excerpt from Sarah's journal:
Eggs drum against the boiling pot and candles burn down to the wick
My hair is soaked with rain, after running through the forest,
Slipping along the muddy slopes, yet keeping enough momentum in my legs
To avoid falling.
It is barely six thirty in the morning.
And I am thinking about the time zone
called Mountain Time, which cuts through
the highlands in Northern America.
Mountain Time is official, standardised.
Uncapitalised mountain time feels elastic, yet mostly slow.
Gabi Abrao’s words ring clear:
“You will receive information in the mountains
You will trade information in the valleys
You will retain information by the ocean.”
It appears true to me that you absorb
more information when on a mountain.
Is it something about altitude, perspective?
Some thoughts that seemed clear cut
seem fuzzy or unimportant when back in the lowlands.
Even through the rain and mist,
light seems to arrive in the center of the stone house
as vertical slats through the octagonal skylight
Standing there feels hallowed
Human skin and insects were glowing
in similar streaks of pale light, under the rainforest canopy one morning.
And all of the mirrors in the stone house seem to be
facing upwards or downwards, as if to capture
the light and expand the sense of space,
And maybe too shy to reflect our shifting forms.
Whenever I travel long distances to arrive
in an unfamiliar place, I spend longer than usual looking in the mirror,
playing a game of catch-up with the body.
I am here, finally, listening to whip birds and whistling kettles
The mountain mechanics that provide a high-pressure whirring,
New morning signals that sharpen my clarity.
(Sarah Moore, 2023)
Sarah and Frances next to a Plumwood tree (Clancy Walker, 2023)