Sustaining place and community through the felt lives of objects: vibrant materialism in small cultural institutions

The slides for the powerpoint presentation Tamsin gave at the conference can be found here

The poet Rumi says everything drawn from its source longs to go back. How might we reanimate objects using their source? Their place of making, of association, of use, of collection, and of desire offers the object both a material and cultural sense of identity. Objects need more than the keeping places of museums or galleries to become animate, engaging, and vibrant. They need to be returned to their places of origin, the places in which they lived their active lives, so as to both engage and become engaged. Perhaps they travel an object trail returning to nearby small museums, perhaps they visit local festivals reconnecting with community, perhaps they are remade and recreated by descendents of the original makers, like the possum skin cloaks of southern Australia found in the National Museum. Or perhaps they live on in their original place, still in use, like the revived school desks full of student graffiti that Nest architects have built into a new canteen. Or perhaps the making of new objects invokes old memories and rituals: like the lake firings of cone shaped kilns over the waters of Lake Cootharaba that have become part of the environmental art festival of Floating Land; or the former Cobb&Co trading route in southwest New South Wales that brings together artists, museums, heritage and landscape with sculptures and artworks; or Murray Arts, who select an object and re-engage it and the community through making a three minute video. In all these cases, the object needs more than story; it needs place.

Drumming and Dancing up place

Land-guage?

Our more-than-human landscape's drumming the wild

Memory linked with ceremonial metaphor.

We, country's human counterparts, attempt transliteration.
Do hosts read country for their guests?
Or does the land read every footprint and teach its own lessons?
What or who embodies its voice?

Travelling words lose their roots, reading replaces monstrous awe,
Maps poor substitutes for memory's metaphors.
Written waymarks replace the loss of the oral
(their placedness retains but remnant power).
Perhaps a sense of country remains?
Embedding us in this site's place and its long history and dreaming...
Our human/nature relationships exposed and celebrated.
Our oral culture remains in music's improvisation;
The land's tempo dimly reflected in our contrived percussions.
Can our arts transcribe this nature?

Method for creativity

Still Breath

Breathe
and practice what you love
You don't have to plan to achieve
You don't have to achieve to succeed
But you might be surprised by what becomes...

Jay Dee Dearness is an artist and printmaker who came for a residency over August/ September 2010. She came bustling with ideas and plans. Perhaps we slowed her down, introduced her to place, reminded her to breathe. Yet, by the end of the first day she had set up the studio, taken pinhole digital camera images, and was already printing. She was inspired: by a beautiful curved open prickly crows ash seed that we gave her, by the evening sunsets that we watched from our outside stage, and by her small straw bale guest house, made of re-used materials borrowed from no longer wanted places.

Culture is the fundamental building block and the basis for every successful society. Culture is not an optional add-on; the arts are not merely creative illustration to the seriousness of life. Flourishing societies have done without science or economics, but none have done without art. Art and culture keep communities alive.

Why do the arts matter most? The arts - writing, painting, music, sculpture, dance, drama, craft, film, and story – not only reflect the type of world we live in, they also direct how we perceive and relate to our environment. Art constructs and celebrates the world.

In contrast, science and political economy dissect the world, reducing it to its component parts, and in this depressing process, we rationalise the environment into a passive resource waiting to be consumed. Art offers us a way to be informed, but not oppressed, by this science of doom.

Art admits complexity, emotion, and narrative so as to reanimate the places we inhabit. We again live within the environment, embedded in our locale. We are no longer separate consumers but immersed participants.

And we live in this irreducible complexity by crafting our lives in the local. By celebrating that which surrounds us, by valuing our neighbours, and by listening to all comers and to all stories; by developing all our local resources, we build better relationships and places.

We live in a more-than-human world. We live with animal, plant, stone, river, and mythology. Each has stories to tell. Our western approach has been to reduce these stories to their component parts, leaving little but dust in our collective wake.

Art allows us to imagine the thick, humid, stories of this biodiversity. We play the host to our ecoregion. The bunyip booms out a warning against wrongdoers, those that misuse the environment will be consumed.

With my partner, Ross Annels, we decided to not only live more simply and lightly upon this earth, but to do so with joy and creativity. We set up the Cooroora Institute to bring together art and environment, to celebrate our local culture and nature.

We hold performances on our outdoor stage and run artist-in-residencies and workshops for and by locals. The Cooroora Institute coordinates and documents environmental art celebrations, community festivals, and art events, including components of Floating Land, as well as facilitating new projects. By celebrating local culture, local experts and local heroes, we reduce the footprint of the cultural cringe and create cultural self-sustainability.

Writers, poets, and storytellers weave up country along with musicians, dancers and environmental sculptors, based upon long indigenous traditions of using art to keep a whole community’s culture strong.

Our work and our lives are intertwined; our family and our food gardens are as much a part of our lives as is our crafting of story and furniture. We celebrate this place and its local people, plant, animal, land. And we hope to model a better story that inspires and illuminates, by using the arts and crafts to celebrate this wonderful world.

This then is our goal: to live lightly and joyously upon this earth. And to do that, we need the arts to build strong local culture.

A short speech by Dr Tamsin Kerr at the launch of the Sunshine Coast Regional Council's creative communities discussion paper, 11 Feb 2010.

Sunday 12th July

Winter wine, women, and songs

To celebrate the launch of both a new group and a new voice on the coast. Australian women singer/songwriters and their friends will perform on the Cooroora Institute’s outside stage between rainforest and garden as the sun sets to celebrate mid-winter and the love of place.

3:00pm Welcome to country

3:30pm Ayla Scanlan

4:00pm DelanyWard launch

5:00pm-late Open mike with shared food, songs, and mulled wine

Your note donation will help pay the performers’ costs. Bring a plate of food and a song to share. There will be a fire under the stars beside the outdoor stage, but bring warm woollies and an open heart!

Ayla Scanlan

Ayla is an award-winning young singer/songwriter from the Sunshine Coast. She won the opportunity to do a demo CD with Robin Young Smith, was runner-up in Caboulture’s Homestead songwriting country music competition, and overall junior winner at the Yandina festival. Her songwriting of unusual and thoughtful lyrics with guitar is an emerging talent to look out for!

Delany Ward

Delany’s metamorphic vocals and lyrics along with Ward’s unique bass and guitar playing form the core of this vibrant group. Alternate rock/folk/jazz and the avant garde are fused to deliver an enigmatic, life-packed and love-jammed performance. Both Delany (Qwerty, Mettaphor) and Ward (Activist Link) create from the edge, working with diverse and marginalised groups to form experimental, creative, and innovative music. Here is a chance to hear DelanyWard in the intimate setting of this more-than-human place, along with friends Linsey Pollak and more...

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Brought to you by the Cooroora Institute: a place of art and environment.

To tread lightly and joyously upon this earth....

Note: This is a steep property and an outside venue. If raining, the concert will be postponed. Ring 544 77746 to confirm attendances.

'Why Art Matters' A short speech at the launch of the Sunshine Coast Regional Council's Creative Communities Discussion Paper, 11 Feb 2010.

Annels, Ross and Tamsin Kerr 2009 Memory keepers, map makers, and material thinkers: the sustained offerings of craft objects paper presented to Making Futures: Craft and Sustainability Conference, Plymouth Art School, September 2009.

'Peaceful space: sound, place, and the environment' in Creative Conservation 3, University of Queensland, September 2008

‘If I say I love my place, what’s with the bags I’ve packed?’ ANU Symposium on Climate Change and the Crisis of Reason, June 2008.

“Landscape’s dreaming the wild. Living Country and methodologies of Place Thinking; from poetry to madness and back again” Two Fires Braidwood, NSW March 2007

Key speaker “The wilder memory of a bunyip” Putting Memory in Place Bloomington, Indiana USA Feb 2007

”A Place for the Wild: Reconciling Culture and Reinhabiting Nature” Transformations Conference, ANU Canberra November 2006

General rapporteur, closing forum, Creative Conservation (Environment, Culture & Community 2) University of Queensland November 2005

”Conversations with the Bunyip, a community memory of place” Cooloola Art Gallery, Gympie November 2005

“Pan place, Coyote space, and Bunyip country: planning for wild-ness and ecological imagination in the creative city” ISOCARP Congress Bilbao, Spain Oct 2005

“Bunyip festivals: ways to track and celebrate the non-human in our cities and regions” National Museum of Australia July 2005

“The business of being artists” Youth Arts National Spark mentoring Mar 2004 and Flying Arts, Youth Arts, OzDance regional training July 2003

John Wolseley dwells in small patches of landscape and precisely paints its flora and fauna, as individual things that capture the whole sense of a place. His paintings are often documents of how we connect to the environment, both as a culture and as individuals. His many pieces mosaic together to form an emotive sense of the whole; his precise scientific detail overlays the vaster space to form an abstract beauty that tells the story of his (and others’) inhabitations. John’s paintings are like waymarks, objects on the side of the human path that show us the way we travel amidst the landscape. His work shows how we build up and construct the landscapes around us.

Ross provides workshops, master-classes and studio visits.

Our outside stage sits between the rising moon and setting sun, between the crows ash and the wattle, between the house and the view, between the domestic and the wild. This is where Linsey Pollak gave his recent concert, The Extinction Room, playing surprisingly uplifting music that drew upon the sounds of rare and endangered animals, as the sun set across our valley amidst the white noise of crickets and frogs. We celebrated with soups and cakes and donations went towards rare and endangered species. This is the life we hoped for – and here it lies; ceremonial time arises quietly in this magic valley. It lies in the everyday as much as it rises in the special. It is a humbling local place rather than a grand event.