Guest Blog from Rita Leduc
Artist Rita Leduc has been co-imaging and co-creating with other humans and with a forest for some time now. In this blog, she reflects on the intersection – and coexistence of intelligences – and how her practice continues to ask questions. Including but not limited to, how can we be guided by the natural world, and how can we treat our work as something that’s constantly unfolding, not something that focuses on endings?
Keeping the “-ing” in Extending Ecology, by Rita Leduc
“The nature of nature is that it’s dynamic and relational. It doesn’t stop nor end, and it does not follow a linear trajectory.
The Oika project, Extending Ecology, is an ongoing collaboration between an ecologist (Dr. Rich Blundell), an artist (myself), and a forest (Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest). The methodology of our project is for the ecologist and artist to share their individual ways of understanding with each other and the forest through the lens of Oika: a philosophy of ecological intelligence. This philosophy includes concepts and practices that span science, deep natural history, creativity, and contemplation. The intention of the project is for the humans to function as emissaries of the forest, activating their own rigorous, multimodal participation to acutely absorb and prudently extend nature’s intelligence into culture.
The intention of the project is for the humans to function as emissaries of the forest …
Six months into this project, curator Meghan Doherty approached us to have an exhibition at the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University. Throughout the following eighteen months, the three of us had countless sessions to determine how this exhibition could hold, and be an extension of, the living, unfolding project – which is a direct extension of the living, unfolding forest.
Simultaneously nurturing the project’s development with the exhibition’s development required us to be on our most ecological behavior. We managed it with sensitivity and fluidity, allowing the exhibition to form within the context of the project…which, as stated, forms within the context of the forest. So as long as we could establish and maintain that continuity authentically, the forest would design the exhibition. And without diminishing the heroic efforts of human team members, being designed by the forest is actually exactly how I would describe the way in which this exhibition came about.
“Extending Ecology: Making Meaning with the White Mountains” opened at the Museum of the White Mountains on October 7, 2023. It was a celebratory moment, but as we paused to honor this achievement, I felt the not-so-subtle elevation of an ever-present consideration. If Extending Ecology is going to remain continuous with nature, then like nature it must remain dynamic and ongoing. Unlike many exhibitions, this one is not presenting a culmination but rather an ongoing sharing-thus-far. So, the project’s dynamism rose to the fore: as we present the project-thus-far to the public, how do we keep the exhibition from feeling like the project’s conclusion? How do we keep the project living and unfolding, like the nature from which it came? How do we keep the “-ing” in extending? It’s a question I’ve granted myself the duration of the exhibition to deliberate.
If Extending Ecology is going to remain continuous with nature, then like nature it must remain dynamic and ongoing.
Now halfway through the run of the show, my sense is that the above consideration is the same challenge as the exhibition but in reverse. Instead of taking a living thing and putting our fingers on it just enough to open a cohesive exhibition, we need to lift our fingers just enough to let it breathe, evolve, extend. So, much like navigating the forest without a trail, we have spent the last month looking up, scanning the landscape, and sensing the direction toward which the project wants to continue. Furthermore, we are trusting that sense, feeding it, and allowing it to feed us.
Feed us it is. Multiple directions have emerged, all brimming with possibility. There is a feeling of not just extension but motion. Extending and moving, all while necessarily remaining studiously (and joyfully) tethered to our firsthand relationships with this particular forest.
So what’s my point here, why is this worth examining? I believe this question is more than just an interesting challenge in an outcome-oriented world. Rather, I believe it is a challenge we should be taking on more often, in all spaces and across all scales. At the innermost core of my being is an impulse to participate with the living world. Not with the surface-level stuff slathered on top but rather with what Oika refers to as the creative life force from which we all come and are all made. Extending Ecology is a case study in Oika’s thesis that if we sincerely, deeply allow ourselves to be guided by nature, it will teach us how to cultivate life.
… if we sincerely, deeply allow ourselves to be guided by nature, it will teach us how to cultivate life.
There is ending and there is extending. One is narrow, determinate and final. The other is boundless, adaptive, and vivacious. In this moment of social, ecological, and technological precipice, honing the wisdom to feel the difference and choose the latter is well worth our time.”
For more about Rita, visit Rita’s PLACE Collective Profile here, and follow links to her website.
You may also be interested in reading this piece: Rita in conversation, with Canvas Rebel.