02 Ripley Whiteside: Depicting wonder

[00:00:00] I'm Catherine Polcz 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 in future. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature and environment, featuring

[00:00:29] scientists, artists, researchers, writers and healers. We released two conversations each month and here from people who have an intimacy with plants in nature. We discussed their work, stories and reflections from the field. Today's conversation is with artist Berkeley White Side.

[00:00:47] 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 is journey from dropping out of

[00:00:59] agriculture, school to art making. He grew up in Chapel Hill in North Carolina. He gained his MFA from S.U.N.Y. Buffalo and he received a bachelor's of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

[00:01:14] He is a drawer, a painter, a printmaker and has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Canada. His work is represented by the Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville and Pierre François-Walette art in Montreal.

[00:01:30] He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Austin P. State University and lived in Nashville, Tennessee. Here's our conversation. You grew up in Chapel Hill in North Carolina. He talked a little bit about that previously,

[00:01:49] but was exploring nature and art's 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

[00:02:05] I was about eight years old and it had a big backyard. It was like a lot that abutted a big gully in the neighborhood so no houses could be built to the left of us. So we had like quarter mile of woods beside our house.

[00:02:21] And that ended up being a place where I spent a lot of time, kids in the neighborhood like diverting this dream with rocks and building forts and doing but

[00:02:33] that was great fun. But then it was when I got a bite was when I really got into exploring and was a suburb that was built not too far away and for a few years of my middle school life

[00:02:48] 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

[00:03:00] in a way even though it was destructive but it somehow in there and the creation of this neighborhood we as the old neighborhood felt nostalgic for when there was just woods but it also gave us a path

[00:03:13] into it that hadn't been there before. But it became like for a while it was sort of like it was just hours with new paths where streets would eventually go were being kind of through

[00:03:26] the woods and that hadn't been bad. That's so interesting and when you're a kid to 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

[00:03:45] rattlesnakes that I don't wish. God or snakes and everything in my suburban time had been development too but just thinking about all those kind of non-places are really part of your landscape. Yeah, it felt very quintessential childhood and then so even at the moment I don't

[00:04:04] 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. And when we we spoke before you told me about at uncle you have totally so my mom grew

[00:04:20] in that Eastern North Carolina and her family or that side of my family my no grandmother side of the family has been an Eastern North Carolina for really long time and so my mom grew up

[00:04:33] on a farm that has been in the family for generations and my uncle lives there now and it really is place out of time. It is an arduous work and his cultural life is 18th and 19th and

[00:04:50] literally a church. It's sort of like the modern world is too much for him. There's enough there from times that were in some ways simpler or him to this be fully be filled up by. It's

[00:05:03] like place, middle and loop and phrases shape and like reads long fellow. It's very inspiring but it's also like that I for a while I was like really taken by the romance of it when I was

[00:05:17] in high school and I didn't see like I loved making part. 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

[00:05:31] that I would study agriculture in now. I live up to this ideal that he had created. But you know as I grown older and got in the know him better and learn more about it he leaves a

[00:05:45] very hard way. It's just hard on the body. He doesn't allow you much time to pursue anything else other than the dollar and he knows this small little spit of land at the end of a long road.

[00:06:01] Yeah, it sounds very arduous but yeah how you live is creating your spiritual practice. Yeah and I think that's very much part of it and he does like he sells some things that a farmer's market mostly he eats what he grows and it is incoming from an ideal

[00:06:19] logical place either. He's always been brilliant for Sidden, Lame Stewart ship and ecology and all of that is how did you go from agriculture to art? I was that transition. Well I figured out

[00:06:34] 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 or school. There were under a thousand students and it was based

[00:06:54] around the farm and everyone at this college has a job. It felt like summer camp and I had this job on the farm that job it was like coveted but I wrote that essay about my uncle and it was

[00:07:08] good you'd with all of that romance. But beyond the farm and it was like so much harder than I ever could have one passion. It was eye opening and it wasn't that the romance of it and that

[00:07:20] sort of is but I at the same time was enjoying drawing and making art classes. I dropped out of school and I just lived it worked for a few years and that was really important. I think that

[00:07:33] when I was going into school but like the thing that I should do but I didn't know what I wanted. I needed to get some willy-south which I did and then I decided okay I can study art there that's

[00:07:48] what I feel and affinity with so I went back to UNC Chapel Hill and then Barton studying art and but yeah my interest in psychology was still there. It's hard to be in those positions where

[00:07:59] 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 but and with so you've studied and have

[00:08:19] 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] And it's something that I feel like has been a lot more central to my practice at previous times of my life that's something that actually hurts. I had a God, real hard and also a lot of lowly health and then it can happen now I just have to

[00:09:04] 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

[00:09:16] in all of that I am finding myself engaging with that space that I'm in now with but also like my neighborhood, the broader neighborhood it's kind of not very attractive it's a but it's

[00:09:28] it's like strut model after strut model and big 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

[00:09:40] it but there is very much a part of my ecological framework now. Yeah some of those stories of place and life have been paved over but they're still there still there makes anything I grew

[00:09:55] up in this town Milton Ontario which is it felt very generic I felt like it could be anywhere in southern Ontario or the states but it's exactly how you described but it had beautiful like

[00:10:08] had nice conservation areas that's a region of the Niagara apartment and then last year one of this small lake in the apartment called Crawford Lake became it like made the news as being

[00:10:24] the best marker of the anthropocene and the in the meetings of geologists they're all like battling and out like where are the sediments the best, where is the evidence captured the most and it was in

[00:10:36] this small lake that we'd always gone to and hiked around it's a small really deep lake so the sediments don't mix so it has you know evidence of indigenous agriculture and pollen grains

[00:10:50] over centuries but it has the like pollution from the 1950s really marked and that was just so interesting connecting that big global disaster the era that we're into a place I mean there's evidence of it across the world but the geologists chose our life

[00:11:15] I feel like I've heard that that's yeah yeah there's a few months ago or earlier this year yeah big big in the Toronto area news I wanted to talk to you I just asked you a bit about

[00:11:34] landscape too or when did your art practice start engaging with nature and landscape or is that always part of your your practice? I was thinking back to like what was the first project where

[00:11:46] it was really dealing with make sure not and like when I was an undergrad I did a project in a class that started out as an assignment for a class and then it turned into a senior thesis project

[00:12:01] and that was a bug collection and so I played entomologist but I just went around for a I think nine months just picking up every dead bug that I found and I got um friend at

[00:12:14] incy state which is like the agricultural extension school and our Carolina and they were the entomology department was getting rid of bug boxes so I got 12 of these beautiful I think they're like made out of cedar and and I got little pins and I mounted all of these

[00:12:33] bugs that I found that started though because when I was a little kid five or six years old I had a bug collection it was just in a jar and I would get excited about climbing bugs and

[00:12:47] a lamp shade or a window so I would be right back and that project in college where I was like given license to pretend I was in the colleges my task was to like deal with the aesthetic

[00:13:03] of that basically that was really liberating and he that was also when I read the row and I was getting excited about like engaging with nature as a present on this yeah I love

[00:13:17] that I am after my first field season was to ecology and floor service I decided to run a it's all very seasonal work and there were just so many it was like felt like the first time I'd

[00:13:31] seen bugs again since being a kid and I didn't know what any of them were and then I just emailed the role on terremuseum asking like if they needed any help in their entomology collection I spent

[00:13:44] 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

[00:13:58] Arctic and some of them were their beetle collection to family and that was so much fun but just a different way of looking like they care that it takes to look at the insects and the different

[00:14:10] 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

[00:14:21] beetles running past you and yeah this scientific way of observation and care that it takes to go the care that you put into a bug collection or I have so you see and I guess that's similar with

[00:14:36] you know like in artworks who 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 said an American artist who

[00:14:50] really has made a career of doing that thing of like playing the the scientists as an artist and looking for what he could contribute kind of looking at that pursuit outside of the scientific

[00:15:05] method and maybe giving it a healthy dose of anarchy and he said some of my favorite projects one of them is he just took a tree from a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest and

[00:15:20] Delta greenhouse that had fallen down and Delta greenhouse around it and it became this living organism in a really appealing way where it it brought people brought people's attention to the functioning of something that otherwise might be overlooked. He's catalogued like

[00:15:41] all of the insects in an 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

[00:15:56] that he was important putting me on the path that I think I'm still on even though it's veered into the painting direction. Yeah I can see those connections and just because you he's come up already twice in the conversation Henry David the row was that what was your

[00:16:18] experience with his writings and and Walden it really is like an introduction it's still presented as kind of an introduction to environmentalism and thinking and what's your experience? I I loved reading Walden I think I read it in high school or knowing in college but um

[00:16:38] but it was the it was his like walking books that I found most inspiring like a kid card especially that that when I've re-read more recently and it's and it's almost just a diary

[00:16:52] but it's got his appealing style and it's this look at a place and a ecology that maybe doesn't exist but he brings it alive and such an important way yeah and he has one about Montreal

[00:17:09] a Yankee and Canada I think this is called really where he yeah I don't know if he walks it's not a walk from bus from like Walden to Montreal but it is it is a long walk and he

[00:17:23] crosses the border and spends time in Montreal and that was when I that was in my dog walking days when I was really engaged with with walking it's like part of my art practice which as I'm

[00:17:36] saying and I'm like I should do that more yeah yeah well perfect opening to talk about Montreal and I think what you said about the dog walking was so interesting to like when I go anywhere with

[00:17:50] 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 the dog? Absolutely that it was like it was such a good

[00:18:06] experience I was working for like a so I had a dog that I would walk every day but also I lived in Montreal moved away for a grad school and when I came back I was hoping to get my

[00:18:18] job back at a bookstore but I had to wait for somebody else to quit and so as I was in that limbo period I started working for a dog walking company and would go you know it was wintering Montreal

[00:18:32] and I would have like four dogs it never more than four so it was pretty manageable but I would have four dogs and we would spend the day together and it was like I got to experience this

[00:18:45] dog world and see what they were seeing and it was great like it very much like you were saying with your son like you my I was much more attuned to like my like knee level perceptions

[00:19:01] and sounds and we would go to places that were nice like the mountain and and Lashin canal and just sort of walk around pick up their up after them and try and keep them out of harm's way

[00:19:18] but but it really did get me thinking about animals and it was from that experience that I had idea for the piece of booking them show which was an exhibition that engaged with like the

[00:19:30] animals that live on the island of Montreal. Can you introduce us to a piece of booking them? What was that what was that what was that project? Yeah so that was an exhibition that I had in 2015

[00:19:46] at Pierre François-Welette and it was a show that where I I made tabloes of animals these were large ink drawings so the animals were drawn on a one-to-one scale and they would um and all of the

[00:20:03] animals that I selected 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

[00:20:15] but also pets and animals and zoos and animals that would you know that we ate so and was that would come to the island to to be turned into me or animals and laboratories just trying to

[00:20:29] think about this 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 in a city

[00:20:43] and how that was a maybe twisted embodiment of this idea of the piece of booking them from the Bible and so there's the and I think it's an I'm not a Christian or a biblical scholar but

[00:21:00] I'm like really interested in the stories that document the Bible I've curiously realized it's shown up a lot in my work but in I think it's Isaiah there's the phrase the lion lies down

[00:21:14] with the lamb and and it's talking about the kingdom of heaven there is no conflict including that the conflict which is inherent to ecology or and I wouldn't even I don't know

[00:21:27] of conflict is the right word but violence maybe and so they're on the island of Montreal there are all of these animals that should they have access to each other violent encounters might occur

[00:21:40] but they they're all isolated many of them are isolated from each other because of us so like there's maybe a good encapsulation of this is the the Montreal biosphere sorry the biosphere is the is the zoo which presents I think like five distinct ecosystems including an Amazon rainforest

[00:22:02] and it's such an incredible experience to go there in the middle of winter when it's so cold outside me of these like automatic doors and you walk into this 85 degrees and there's steam coming

[00:22:13] out and birds calling and and it's also completely artificial but it also has it's very cleverly so and there's everything is kind of disguised but then also within those environments there are predators and prey that live in close proximity but you know they they keep the

[00:22:36] the camons very well fed and so the farm is set so whatever they're happy bearers that are sharing the same enclosure aren't threatened by them and that felt like a really good metaphor for

[00:22:50] you know everything that had been building up there and and then also around that time I came across the the work of Stephen Meyer he wrote a book called The End of the Wild and that's where

[00:23:04] 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

[00:23:19] species being on the verge of extinction would be a relic species and that a ghost species as an animal that is only kept alive outside of its native ecosystems and that includes like that a

[00:23:35] hotel which is a salamander native to Mexico that has a the like the external gills yeah exactly and and so they they are no longer found in the area around I think it's

[00:23:51] Mexico City where they're native to but you can find them in testors all over the world and so this would be like a ghost species and Stephen Meyer's description and then there was another term for

[00:24:04] we these species that really resonated and those are animals that are able to thrive alongside of humans and so in Montreal there would be retailed hawks and coyotes and squirrels and rats

[00:24:20] but it's sort of like the the wild animals that we end up seeing a lot of would be these we these species that have figured out a niche copicetic to urban life yeah and I guess we are very weedy species yeah yeah the the earliest resilient adaptable

[00:24:43] hard to get rid of disgusting yeah I think so many of those animals too I mean what's another thing that's really interesting is that they're invisible right when you think of Montreal you might think of wildlife of Montreal you think of raccoons and blue jays and

[00:25:05] hawks like those native wild animals where they you know by biomass they're probably a small proportion of what has even probably more cats than foxes yeah yeah yeah I heard I think just earlier this week that statistic that we're the 4% of phana that is not that is

[00:25:30] well yeah of all the phana on earth 4% is considered wild as yeah like it's mostly calves yeah yeah it's uncomfortable it is yeah yeah and I guess you were talking about those

[00:25:46] dynamics and in one of your pieces there's a came in and a chicken and I think a chowawa what what is can you describe that that watercolor and the dynamics at play their and why you chose chose those animals yeah that was the that was the

[00:26:05] incentive piece in the show that was the first one that I made and the the chowawas there representing my dogs that I was walking every day yeah I'm not sure where so the the

[00:26:17] came in was from the from the biosphere and I really enjoyed drawing a came in in my sketchbook and I was that and I felt empowered to make it life size so that's a pretty large drawing

[00:26:33] and the chowawas and chicken are on writing it's back and then there's also a little robin that one also has um tulips in it and there's Mount Royal in the background yeah the the tulips

[00:26:47] 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

[00:27:00] interest in making my own 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 I had what was that experimentation process like how did you

[00:27:20] had where to find the recipe yeah it was something I friend of mine out a colleague and my in my cohort had a walnut tree in her yard and had heard about how you can extract the tannins and

[00:27:34] 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 kind of doing analysis to make sure that none of these pigments go fugitive and it turns out

[00:27:54] this walnut ink is archival and has been a like a cp atone used for centuries mugs were writing with it so it felt like a was part of a long tradition and also it's like econ amicol

[00:28:10] how many black walnuts do you need to make a gallery I'm not sure you collect where you just walking the streets with pillow cases full of walnuts I'm an indienid probably I feel like I

[00:28:23] passed a pot a large pot filled with walnuts and then also filled with water that will yield maybe like a couple of courts of ink and I would want to cook it down for a long time to make it thicker and

[00:28:38] 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

[00:28:51] are dropping there they're not everywhere and yeah and I want to talk about one other work from this series this one was called from a piecebooking to a ment royal which has I could identify a turkey

[00:29:05] culture a hawk a grace world I took a guess on google a golden line to hammering I kind of monkey yes exactly that which are kind of stars at the the biosphere the golden line hammering and then another kind of hammering with um that's a black and white

[00:29:29] little very fabulous looking like yeah yeah and so they were favorites of mine from the biosphere there was like they're really engaging in curious and one feature of this show was posed all of the

[00:29:47] animals so they're making eye contact with the the viewer which is something that these that the golden line tamerans and and warmest sets in particular the biosphere I felt like

[00:29:59] 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 the zoo viewing experience well we're walking

[00:30:15] around looking at the animals they're also looking at us and it is a shared space between species and and they kind of they do have this agency that we have taken most of it from but from away

[00:30:30] from them but um and then there's like an unartistorical corollary with mayonnaise Olympia the model looking back at the the viewer that wasn't like as top of mine but it kind of came up

[00:30:44] in the process and I felt like it resonated years ago maybe it was around this time sorry it wasn't breaking news but it was very interesting there's this young girl I think she

[00:30:55] lived in England and she always fed like the crows in her backyard and they had these like neighborhood crows and it went on for a long time and they would bring her gifts and shiny things and she had

[00:31:08] all these collections of what they would give her and she loved taking photos and she had the gone out one day like taking photos you know further away from home somewhere else in

[00:31:19] the neighborhood and had lost her camera lens cap and then it was weeks later the crows had returned it to her but just that sense of the animals see you and they know you and wow yeah makes you think of that they're watching they're watching back at you

[00:31:41] yeah yeah I've just picked 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 like how the animals in in some cases are rising up like the the orcas that the orcas

[00:32:00] got after yacht and it really isn't like it's important to remember that it's not our world and and but these organisms have agency and and and always like the idea that instead of making

[00:32:14] like contact with some alien species from a different planet like well figure out how to communicate with animals and I do feel like they and maybe some of that is actually happening certainly with like whales but but our our hubris is is definitely showing but the whale story

[00:32:35] it was so appealing wasn't it everybody felt like yeah get up but when you're talking about Steven Mary's working the different classifications of species they just made a note also many think of this other talk that I I went to and just talking about like winners and losers

[00:32:51] in the climate emergency but it was an exhibition whose alien vision tape was the curator of it but it was from the perspective of jellyfish which will do very well in the climate emergency

[00:33:06] and you know it's our catastrophe but it's not that it's not the same for every species or yeah yeah somebody will inherit the earth it might very well be jellyfish yeah kind of fungus the great era of jellyfish and cockroaches which brings us to the next series

[00:33:30] I wanted to talk to you about a more recent one you know looking at collapse and emergency or miracles in the book of miracles in that series can you tell me a little bit about

[00:33:42] about this this work absolutely so that um the book of wonders was the title of the show and it was an exhibition also with here from Swarwelle and it involved quoting images from this book called

[00:33:59] the Augsburg Book of Miracles which was published in that I did not publish but it's a illuminated manuscript from my I think that 15th century I'm you know that I'm like on the

[00:34:10] on the spot about it I don't know if I have made I don't have the I is around 1550 1550 excellent yes and so it is a book that describes the it begins by describing the book of

[00:34:26] 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

[00:34:45] images of like the burning of 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 and there was like I've always been interested in print making

[00:35:11] there was an image that is an end of 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

[00:35:22] 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 and it feels so much like

[00:35:36] vomiting or that image felt like I could put fire coming out of the mouth and so that isn't an image that isn't this book but it had been like engaging with artistically I guess with this

[00:35:49] this era through that way that was my my way in I feel I was embarrassed about how I came across this book in particular it was like an image that was unlike a really hip gallery familiar

[00:36:03] work they put it on their Instagram page for like denoting the holidays or something but it was one of the images from the book of miracles describing a sundog and like a piraheulia we know it as a

[00:36:16] 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 sundog's growing up but during the Renaissance this was something that was wildly abnormal occurrence and

[00:36:37] considered a sign from God so that image of three sons just like hit me like a bolt of lightning and I felt like that the greatest depiction of what living on a warmer planet might feel like

[00:36:52] so from that point I got a copy of the book and started pouring through it and I felt like I could find correlative images in the bottom state of things. Yeah so each painting in the book of wonders exhibition correlates to a specific folio image? There's I think

[00:37:15] there's over 50 plates and some of them would be pretty similar to another lots of comments and lots of these sundogs and some of them are just so wonderful like a rain of grain

[00:37:30] in a small town or animals that return to the wild I love this idea of just the animals on a farm she kind of picking up and going back to the woods. Yeah and that being an event that they're

[00:37:47] like we must keep this story for generations to come. You know and then I was curious to just kind of try and figure out how to fit stories of modern ecology into these old stories and so like

[00:38:05] that there's four green parrots in the show and green parrots all over the world in parrots in general but will escape captivity and develop colonies. So escape pet stores and find comfortable life in a city park in Los Angeles or New Orleans these are cities that

[00:38:29] have pretty healthy populations of parrots from Southeast Asia or the Amazon so that was an example of these kind of an update of the book of wonders. Yeah it's another time again you know there's

[00:38:44] so many extreme weather events you have changes in constellations in the sky in your series and feels like we're living in that in that time with fires and floods and snowstorms being called snow snowmigat in and everything but we find I guess a different a different meaning

[00:39:06] it but I think you see mentioned one of the works already I wanted to ask you about which is wet bulb parahealia which is kind of an orange hazy city scape with three sands in this

[00:39:20] sky it made me think a lot about and when you're you're mentioning wet bulb in your title a different phenomenon but maybe thanks so much of the season of forest fires we call black summer

[00:39:31] 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 reminded me of but can you tell us about

[00:39:46] wet bulb and in this piece? Yeah this was one of the the first piece that I envisioned for the show and I've read about so I read about the wet bulb phenomenon we're in about it in the opening

[00:40:00] section of canstomely rubbed and since book the Ministry of the Future and it's one of the most horrific chapters that I've encountered that I've describing 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

[00:40:22] and it made the the reality of the gravity of the climate crisis that really brought it home in terms of like survival and how that becomes part of the narrative not just like preserving

[00:40:38] the world as we know I but actually getting through it and so that was I was very affected by that very specifically I was thinking about these images of wildfires and here it was like September

[00:40:55] night 2021 that we were like well we were all still kind of in quarantine my end but that was when California had its I mean these wildfires have been going on but I remember that day just like

[00:41:09] the internet was orange everyone was kind of shocked at how you know our world was all of us that been like absolutely irrevocably affected and undeniably so and and it felt like a turning point

[00:41:23] in a way and I was thinking about this work and the book of miracles wildfires are also absent in book of miracles which is really interesting did they not have force fires in medieval

[00:41:39] yer after that time like is that something like yeah this 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

[00:41:52] they were just kind of accepted as non-events or like we in this country had this like now very tellingly wrong legacy of like smokey the bear saying only you can prevent forest fires and

[00:42:08] and the effects of like widespread fire suppression leading to the development of undergrowth that his fueled some of these fires in ways that if they had just kind of naturally run their course

[00:42:21] in a forest that wasn't as dense it might not have been as big a deal but yeah as dubious as some of the origins of these events might be like it is a history of medieval yer up environment

[00:42:39] in a way too there's this really interesting work that this she's the climate scientist who named sterile gurgust she's Australian she did part of her work was looking at the art in photography archives of colonial australia to put together that environment and climate

[00:43:03] in the period since colonization which includes before climate and industrial revolution too if they're looking at the archives of museums at photography of snowstorms in adilate or things like that and that just makes me think of this book I just hadn't made that connection before it is

[00:43:22] document of natural phenomena and disaster that dates back to you know centuries in that in that land and you're just updating it right yeah but some of the miracles and the book of miracles

[00:43:36] were you know like earthquakes they do show up in the geological record and you know they were yeah yeah the suvious is in there don't know about all of the children angels fighting each

[00:43:52] other to death in the sky but we weren't there maybe over hungry and it says it was observed by many reliable people yeah sure sure who's to say and other work that I wanted to speak to you about

[00:44:13] I'm not sure if this is the right pronunciation to a retro yeah directo so a directo was something that I was unfamiliar with it's a meteorological phenomenon that I didn't know until

[00:44:27] moving to Nashville so it's a it's a straight line windstorm that happens in the planes and so it we experienced one here in 2020 and it was wild like that so it's a it's a line of wind

[00:44:44] 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 kind of sweeping across

[00:44:59] the landscape blowing down everything that comes in its path and it's over really fast like it it comes and goes and this is a type of storm that I think is more common than I realized

[00:45:12] like as strong as the tornado the winds like it's really extreme though it's not quite a tornado but it's still like 100 plus mile-a-long winds yeah trees get knocked over there where people

[00:45:26] will talk about the the directo of 2020 in a way that you will talk about I'm other kind of major storm and I've experienced hurricanes before in North Carolina and similar to that there's like an

[00:45:40] eerie green color that the sky becomes bright before and swirling strange clouds and then just this like absolutely punch of wind that lasts for maybe 15 minutes and minutes over so I wanted to include that fun new meteorological experience that I learned about and then in the show

[00:46:03] it was the I had changed the title at some point it was the yeah the rain of grain there's there's another wind in that the book where it rains pests like it rains flesh sometimes

[00:46:15] in grain and insects blood yeah all sorts of fun things well for this guy and so in the show this was it's the largest piece in the show and it's watercolor but it's not on watercolor paper

[00:46:37] it's just on drawing paper and I created it over the course of a few days so I would put down an incredible amount of watercolor and while it was still wet like I would mix up a quarter gallant

[00:46:52] of a quarter of of color and wash it across the paper and while it was still wet I'd put objects on the paper so that when the watercolor dried it would the surface tension

[00:47:04] if 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 those yeah there's a there's an organization

[00:47:20] that I could hear a national that I absolutely love it's a reuse store and so they have they have bins and bins of bottle caps and medicine bottles or when just kind of lots of

[00:47:36] plastic and so they're diverting it from the landfill and people can use it for whatever they use it for and so I besides my own recycling bins I went there and

[00:47:48] it's the kinds of things that would be whipped around in the wind to it and like remote controls and packing material and lots of weird small toys I mean there's like a horror that comes with it

[00:48:02] 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 I'm not angry about it it's sort of just like a fact

[00:48:16] that we're pumping out a whole lot of plastic and then you have a ocean garbage patch uh the great southern gyr water bottles and sushi soy sauce fish yeah yeah totally so it feels like

[00:48:36] it's on its way back to us at some point and we just don't have the for the religious spirit wash it away we should away yeah yeah could you have another work landfill

[00:48:53] and earthquake in the series that is about that one is sort of relates to like the Nashville real estate boom and and all the overhead which is a very like hit part of town um that we started

[00:49:08] to notice that every time a house went on the market it would be bought by a developer who had tiered that the house down and these are like ranch houses built in the 50s that are

[00:49:19] probably on a quarter acre lot maybe half an acre 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

[00:49:33] and so the the landfill is those images came from some of these demolition sites right around the corner from where we live where perfectly livable house and the material that the amount of material was really overwhelming to me I was really disturbed by these like profit margins

[00:49:52] that these developers were chasing that seemed so small relative too you know this 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 yeah and construction such a huge carbon footprint it really is like

[00:50:13] all that cement yeah cement is a different step so it's like 8% of the missions or about that but it's the second after water it's the second most used material by humans wow that's so amazing and and the scary because it feels so permanent it is like

[00:50:39] that is the geological record wow yeah our our initial stone um but when you're talking about that to just make me think of your you know your childhood and exploring those building sites

[00:50:54] and places opening up yeah actually it I hadn't thought about this in a while but there near my mom's house and 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

[00:51:15] they were you know maybe like a dozen houses and even a street light very like narnia and and it that was probably 50 years ago and so there's it's really become part of the landscape

[00:51:29] it's like heart to see you know you don't see it at all at once and then you realize oh this is you know we're standing on a intersection but we're in the middle of the woods but there's like

[00:51:40] houses over there and and there are just foundations the other piece that I wanted to ask you about was starlink and burning torch in this series tell us about tell us what it's starlink yeah

[00:51:55] in the book of miracles they're all of these celestial signs so lots of comments and we are a clips phenomena and this was at that the moment when Starlink entered our common experience and it feels such well it draws attention to this kind of extension of her ecosystem

[00:52:19] I find the pursuit of like life on Mars and space exploration I find that to be really disturbing and and also really pessimistic like we're we're not gonna figure it out here and so

[00:52:32] we should put our energy elsewhere and I have never seen a starlink satellite my dad has my dad looks kind of out in the country and he didn't know what it was when he first saw them and I

[00:52:44] and it was around when I quickly was able to figure it out but still that it I feel like it is rare that we have these encounters that kind of in a phenomena logical way that would be

[00:52:56] coral you know and 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

[00:53:10] for an explanation just to see it and not know what it is yeah I've seen I may have just seen Starlink once because they're really low they're really bright they're brighter than anybody thought

[00:53:23] they would be and it is just a line of things that many amazing well a lot of amazing but images of astronomers saying like Starlink does their beautiful like nebula pictures or just

[00:53:36] transact by the by the satellites I had a used to manage night tours at this beautiful historic observatory where we had PhD students in astronomers connect audiences with the southern sky

[00:53:50] every night very um beautiful experience and I think it was with them on one of the meetings that we all went out like had to go cut the meaning Starlink was going to pass over and to go see it

[00:54:00] for the first time yeah so controversial I think they have 4,000 satellites or something right now but like are planning for like would like to send 40,000 but I loved this work space environmentalism is just

[00:54:14] blowing my mind and I'm so interested in it like to think about space sustainability has been a really interesting way back into thinking about climate and earth those this amazing Gamila Roy indigenous astronomer in Australia Carly Nune and she writes about she has this concept

[00:54:32] that she's developed with crystal denathaly another indigenous Australian scientist talking about sphere and all the us and just the values that you know we're just bringing the same values to space

[00:54:45] to go trash like to go think you can exploit mining resources on the moon or to leave debris and pollute all the satellites you just bring those same values to space which is really at odds

[00:54:59] with the indigenous view of space and writing about sky sovereignty and Starlink disrupting constellations and traditional knowledge um because it's just kind of the beginning of more satellites that will be up there so right and it's such the the colonizing impulse you know

[00:55:19] yes it's there and so let's because we can or yeah yeah and it feels like it's um yeah really lacks for sight yeah yeah they're finite resources even um radio frequencies are finite resource and wealthy countries already own the like thinking about physical things

[00:55:43] are not tangible things in that same way as resource like orbits has just been really expansive and kind of breaking apart that very western science way ahead of being like here's sphere of ecology and biology and here's the study of the stars and the study of that breaking

[00:56:01] it breaks a lot of that open for me which is in trick as book of miracles too like it's equating everything right all the celestial phenomena is presented in the same way uh droughts and plagues and yeah what's the burning torch deep

[00:56:19] deep which is the one that is correlated with Starlink in your work and appears quite a few times in book of miracles oh that is also um i think that so i saw one i think it's a comet

[00:56:37] but there there is also like a pillar of light phenomena which i actually saw at my door and I have a really long commute and i have to get up and and i see the sunrise

[00:56:51] every morning from my 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

[00:57:08] but it might be a type of a comet that when i'm not sure about um yeah it's drawn exactly as a stick on fire yeah following in this guy and look and it's it's on the cover of the book

[00:57:22] there's there's others and there's other comments that are shown as like us an arm with a sword yeah um many times yeah and i don't know if that has like some kind of roots in

[00:57:35] in like a mythological story i i should no more about that but um i feel like i don't have a concise answer it's not coming up every day in your life i've been looking for

[00:57:49] burning swords in this guy yeah yeah it's climate emergency is a disaster that we caused and we're really this morally challenged and technologically challenged period trying to navigate through that and seeing meanings in attributing climate to or to not to the disasters and

[00:58:11] it's interesting to translate what that work meant when it was created in the 1550s to how we're looking at at the world again yeah and that was a time of such incredible change across the board like a growth of city so you're up in technology i find myself

[00:58:33] taken a back at how much is happening in the world right now and how fast things seem to be changing and so that that's front up my knolso yeah starlink is a good example of that

[00:58:47] Kim 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

[00:59:02] can you what what did you mean by that what can you elaborate i think it's like precisely what we're we're just talking about of just these that natural world does often offer mystery and that's something that i find inspiring and and it's like mystery on lots of different

[00:59:19] levels um like even just kind of in physical manifestations of like things grow above and below the ground and there's things that the ecosystem extends like to all aspects of our lives and

[00:59:36] as i've like in the past five or six years maybe i've like i was in a relationship with a pretty hardcore atheist for a long time and i found myself ascribing to accepting the world

[00:59:52] without a spiritual dimension at all i think another thing that goes back to the the piece of bookingdom series is that i did it in mention earlier but those paintings were inspired drawings that they were inspired by the paintings of Edward Hicks who was a a quicker preacher

[01:00:10] who painted that that scene in the Bible of the lion lying down with the lamb he kind of painted that ad nausea he made at least sixty versions of that painting and he was self taught and

[01:00:22] and they're great they're like their iconic early american folk art and i was raised in the quicker meeting my mom is a quicker and and so when that relationship ended i found myself going

[01:00:36] back to quicker meeting and just for the comfort of it initially and i i have to confess that since i bought a house and have lots of projects to do i haven't been so that's like been over six

[01:00:50] months now but but i do find that that practice to be important and inspiring and and it when i when i go i feel very much reset and and it is the sense of community it's like

[01:01:05] god is in the people you know that's what it's like something that we make maybe um and the Quakers do it better than anybody else that i've encountered i think it's a really wholesome

[01:01:20] practice without any dog mind of all the it's great and that makes me think of yeah i mean i don't know if you so Quaker makes me think of your uncle again but just like even you know

[01:01:32] art making is personal spirituality for a lot of artists too and finding your own meaning and how you relate to the world through all the different ways i wanted to talk to you about your garden too which seems like shading is part of this conversation too the

[01:01:52] acting care and attention and nurture tell you about your garden plans oh it's so much fun it's like that's where i've been instead of quicker meeting on Sunday mornings like

[01:02:04] guaranteed so we we have a i house with about half an acre um that's on a half acre lot and most of it is a really big backyard that was well landscape by the previous owners so there's

[01:02:17] some fruit trees and a building that i think is as far as we can tell it's the oldest building in the the neighborhood it's like this garden shed back there that's it yeah it's it's over 150 years

[01:02:30] old probably and and it's just like an old shed but it feels really special and that it is just stayed there and and then the the our tasks well they had done kind of a beautiful job of

[01:02:45] creating a space back here that the couple that had lived here hadn't done anything in the backyard for quite a few years so it's this summer has been a task of just sort of like figuring out where

[01:02:57] things might get planted so there's a nice vegetable garden plot now and and some places for flowers and they're already a half a dozen which were trees in the backyard that we're going to be getting

[01:03:11] some more and I and I feel like having a garden as part of it but also like nurturing a little bit of forest even though it's a tiny little area is a I think it really fun prospect and also like

[01:03:24] yeah we've 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 and that's very it feels like a really good pursuit and I love

[01:03:37] 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 note I'm doing but I know that I'm gonna have to mess up a lot

[01:03:51] in between now and then and I already have that was my conversation earlier this year with artist Ripley White side thank you for listening and huge thank you to Ripley for sharing his work. Pliking them is hosted and produced by me

[01:04:17] Katherine Boltz we have production support by Max Merch and our music is by Carl Tider listen to us where we get your podcasts and check out our website at Pliking them dotter