In the above photograph I am sat at a desk above Loch Linnhe in the Western Highlands performing a work entitled Swearing An Oath To A Scottish Glen as part of the series Actions for & Against Nature. A Commission for Creative Scotland in collaboration with London Fieldworks and Resonance FM.
Below is an extract from Notes after a week of wandering around… an essay published in the book that emerged from this project entitled Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture. I also spent my time in Scotland Reading Poetry to Rocks, Throwing Rocks at Trees and Reading Particle Physics to a River. In the depths of time I have also Explained Power to a Pipeline, Learned to Translate Lithuanian and Thrown Pine Needles at Pine Trees due to health and safety concerns over the rocks business. If you want to commission an Action For or Against any given bit of the world you deem to be Nature, drop me a line.
nature /na-cher/ n (often with cap) the power that creates and regulates the world; all the natural phenomena created by this power, including plants, animals, landscape etc as distinct from people; the power of growth; the established order of things; the cosmos; the external world, esp as untouched by man[…] Definition taken from Chambers 10th Edition, 2006 (that last italicization is mine).
ii.
The trouble with language is that it is the first barrier between oneself and the world. One can also however imagine language as a bridge, the only way off the small island of our consciousness and out there, into that swirling mass of world. The trouble is as soon as you label something, as you do with language, you inherently label it as something other, something over there, something not me, something else.
iii.
Actions For And Against Nature, whilst initially conceived as a way of crossing this bridge, is really about pointing at all these labels we have created and screaming “THERE IS NO GAP BETWIXT US!” It’s a part of me, and it’s a part of you, and it’s a part of that grass blade and it’s a part of that tree, a part of that building, and that town hall. The Actions are for ecology, and against the term Nature, pointing at its problems and the problems it has caused us.
iv,
Nature. The word hangs before us, an immediate separate entity that we then entrench with an almost endless series of synonyms and linguistic pirouettes: countryside, wildness, wilderness, The Great Outdoors, we further elaborate and name all the things within it from rocks to books, trees to brooks. Nature, as discussed by Timothy Morton is a great metonymic phrase that we have forgotten we are part of and Morton “…argues that the very idea of “nature” which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an “ecological” state of human society”1.
When you are physically there with it though, feet touching earth, pinned to mud by gravity, you are part of it, as Pollock once said in answer to a question “…I am nature”2. The atoms on your fingertips mingle with the feather you’re holding, you are entwined and deeply involved, you are together one, there is no barrier, no bridge. The case for ecology without nature is about trying to make us aware that the bridge off each of our islands was not built by us. It is neither a separate entity nor a separating force, it is more akin to a synaptic cleft that draws us out into the world, it is not there as a separate ‘thing’ at all. We are part of ecology, it is within us and around us, in our streets and homes, in the cities we’ve built and the industrial wastelands we’ve walked away from.