Nourishment

1. food, or the valuable substances in food that a person, animal, or plant requires to live, grow, or remain fit and healthy
2. something that provides a stimulating and healthy emotional or intellectual environment for people or animals

Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation.

My parents intersect in the evolution of my arts practice as they do in my blood and bones. My mother, the eternal optimist, nourished my body, my sensitivity for light and colour, and harmony and growth. My father, more the realist, nourished my understanding of form, gravity, the Earth’s evolution, space, time, and the sublime. Both actively cultivated an appreciation for the arts, and many genres of music, visual arts and texts were frequently examined. They both nurtured a patience to feel nature elementally and a connection in all things large and very small.

As a child my mother and her family endured WWll in the Netherlands. Fresh provisions, fuel, and clothing were scarce. Sustaining health entailed being resourceful, open minded, and adapting to an unpredictable environment. Almost everything was recycled. It was understood at an early age life is fragile.

My mother wanted to study medicine. My grandparents did not support this as an option for a female child. They did however support a less costly education in physiotherapy, which they regarded as more fitting and flexible in relation to destined motherhood. All 3 daughters studied physiotherapy.

My mother married, worked, had me, and moved to Canada with my father. Her foreign degree in physiotherapy did not qualify her to work. Against my father’s wishes she opted to be a fulltime mother and homemaker to three children.

She nourished us by encouraging ample outdoor play and sports, arts and crafts, music and reading, dancing and cooking, story telling and sewing … stoking our imaginations with self directed opportunities and cultivating our skills in resourcefulness. This left her time to pursue her own interests in nutrition, gardening and outdoor sports. She especially delighted in baking bread and making every meal from scratch using wholesome unprocessed foods.

Her interest in nutrition accelerated with reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In the early ‘60s, Carson meticulously described how DDT developed for purposes of warfare became available for agricultural and domestic application. Entering the food chain, DDT accumulates in the fatty tissues of animals, including humans. Carson outlined the contamination of the food chain, cancer, genetic damage, and the deaths of species. How could it be that war on humans had turned to war on pests and weeds? In the decade of my birth extermination became the stock answer solution to anything perceived to be out of place or interfering with economic progress.

It still haunts my mother today that in 1961 a chemist recommended she use liberal amounts of DDT to rid their Utrecht apartment of a flea infestation. My father died of pancreatic cancer aged 54. My mother has had significant health issues. In the 1970s I remember wearing a badge proclaiming “You are what you eat.”

Nourishment, survival, sustainability

My Father’s family, also Dutch, moved to Indonesia in 1937. My grandfather was an ophthalmologist and worked with the Dutch military. In 1942 the Japanese army invaded. My father, his mother, and baby brother were sent to a ‘camp’ for European women and children. Seventy-five percent of the people in theses camps died within 3 years. My grandfather, was, I believe drafted by the Japanese army to administer his medical knowledge. During the course of the war he abandoned his wife and two boys and married an Indonesian nurse.

In 1945, my father, his little brother and mother returned to Holland on their own and destitute. My father was 11 and sent to a fat farm (to put on weight). He started school age 13. He wanted to be an aircraft pilot, but later failed an eye test. A family friend suggested he study Earth Science. He studied geophysics and his fieldwork area was in the Pyrenees of Spain

A chronic lack of jobs (especially for geologists in Holland which has very little rock) and housing after the War led to the decision to immigrate to Canada in 1962. My mother, father and I sailed on the xxx arriving at the immigration centre in Quebec City.

In the 27 years we had together as father and daughter he always reminded me of how lucky we were. We had everything we needed. Only once did he share his wartime experiences in the Japanese camps and in this way he acknowledged to us he was dying. In his lifetime his closest friends had been visiting Japanese scientists to Canada and this perceived act of forgiveness was his biggest gift to me. I carry forward such acts of forgiveness as a form of nourishment and hope for humanity and the Earth.

Sustainability

The following text is an extract from my catalogue Promised Land published by the Perth International Arts Festival, 2001.

One does not impose, but rather exposes the site - be it interior or exterior. Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa. The unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists. Robert Smithson

In the past twenty years I have often cooked for geological crews in the Canadian Arctic and in more recent years during winter months work as a navigator and geological assistant in the Australian outback. In the outback, we spend weeks travelling by truck. My job is to navigate and scan the countryside for dolerite outcrops that we drill for geophysical specimens. From dawn to dusk I negotiate terrain with several maps in my lap. I never wander too far without a map or a compass. It would be unfair to the rest of the crew if I got lost. It is very stressful trying to locate a missing person in the so-called middle of nowhere.

I try to keep the maps clean, but with every passing day they absorb more of the country, as though trying to reconnect with the source. The dirt-encrusted, threadbare fold lines, stained surfaces, lightly pencilled scribbles, and holes caused from spreading the maps over rough ground, record my movements across the land.

In the bush my body is engaging constantly with the Earth - its contours, colours, textures and materials - even as I sleep. Years later I can still feel the deep satisfaction of curling up on a sun-drenched patch of moss, with a large granite boulder at my back keeping the bite of an arctic wind at bay. Sometimes I stay tucked away for hours and simply delight in quietly absorbing the movements, sounds, and scents of a passing day - clouds, wind, warmth, insects, falcons, hawks, caribou, tiny flowers, rivulets of water. In more southern latitudes of the Pilbara and Little Sandy Desert regions, I delight in leaping from dolerite boulder to boulder on winding russet-coloured ridges, letting the rocks ring like bells with taps from my hammer, and paying my respects to the beings incised on the rounded rock surfaces. I am always happiest when out on the land, where occasionally there is silence and no human sounds or noise except for the occasional jet far overhead.

I spend hours walking through abandoned mines, documenting sites and just wandering and exploring to my heart’s content. In essence, just being. Getting away from noise in the mind. All senses are engaged. This is what I understand to be truly aware; meandering through the bush, wading through tall grasses, through creeks, across sand dunes or snow and icefields. Because of my line of work I am occasionally privy to visiting underground mines and massive open pits. I always wonder where all the ore ends up and what it is manufactured into. I try to take my grounded experiences from different sites home with me. Clays, dirt, dust, rocks, pebbles, drill core, and pigments mix with flagging tape, feathers, bones, drawings and rusted bits and pieces of long abandoned equipment. Pockets, lunch bags, envelopes, rusted billy cans and other makeshift containers bulge with small treasures. Sometimes I note the object's geographical coordinates.

My collections are piled on surfaces and in corners and cupboards throughout the house and studio. Geographies from two hemispheres sit side by side on windowsills both inside and out. They taunt me with my constant desire to go bush and vie for space with my partner's more scientific specimens. For each of us, individual pieces of earth evoke a different memory of time and place.

In a sense it's obvious that in terms of the physical world scientists make the more fundamental statements, but artists and philosophers don't have a less important job. They humanize, they find out what the significance of science is for human beings… It takes a long time for philosophers and artists to pick up the pieces. - Tony Cragg

I come from a family of geoscientists and as an artist interested in geography and geology I try to situate my efforts in relation to their scientific discoveries and understandings of the Earth. I often return to Cragg's words, which seem to occupy a space between the efforts of the geology community and mine as a storyteller. Cragg's words encourage me to pursue my ideas and to express my perceptions of our links to the land. At other times, however, his words overwhelm me with a sense of responsibility and urgency. There are so many important, exciting, and diverse 'pieces' to be picked up, but there is also much we don't understand about the Earth or fully appreciate about the possible detrimental effects we are having on its evolution.

I believe more stories about the land need to be heard and also that we must better educate ourselves about the ground beneath our feet and the links that exist between our homes and habits, the distant geographies that nourish us, and the places we send our waste to. This cannot happen without scientific inquiry or just from a television or computer monitor. It requires action, commitment, a will to make the world a better and safer place, and, most importantly, to experience and appreciate the physical world in real time.

The linking between home and ground has resulted in my increasing reverence for the Earth and ecology. My works embody earth directly, are manufactured from it, or contain information about it. In this manner, I trace links between the mapping we do in the bush and our urban, consumption-driven existence that is so highly dependent on geologically derived resources. To grow up learning to perceive the world in terms of billions of years in the making is humbling and terribly exciting. However, to witness the rate at which we are plundering and polluting it I find most distressing and alarming.

A conundrum I have with working on geological crews is that the beautiful geological maps we create of pristine places may be used by others as a source to fuel short-sighted extractive economies too often built on greed and waste. Many geoscientists believe that the ground continues to hold great economic promise, while others remain unconvinced. I am not opposed to mining (its impact on the environment in Australia is relatively benign compared to many widespread agricultural practices), but I am angered at our collective blindness and incessant demand as consumers for more and more stuff. How much crap do we really need? Do we really believe more stuff makes us happier? Before we buy, how often do we consider the impact on the environment? And do we really care enough about the Earth that extends beyond our own backyard? Extinction, loss of habitat, increasing air and water pollution, and soil degradation and toxicity are just parts of the answer.

The most intimate material connection most of us seem to have with the ground on a day-to-day basis is through its modification into the trappings of office, home, and vehicle. Can we really appreciate the earth when our feet so seldom touch it directly? William Bryant Logan wrote "We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. ‘It must be somewhere up there on the horizon,’ we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet."

1. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, (ed) jack Flam, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1996, p. 102
2. "Tony Cragg Interviewed by Lynne Cooke." reprinted in Tony Cragg by Germano Celant, London: Thames & Hudson, 1996, p. 172.
3. Mary White, Listen, Our Land is Crying, Kangaroo Press, 1997
4. William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, New York: Riverhead Books, 1995, p. 97