talks

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.

The wilder echoes of peaceful places[1]

[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented in September 2008 to the University of Queensland’s Peaceful Space: sound, space, and the environment as part of an ongoing environment, culture, and community conversation.

We live in constant collaboration with nature. In the oikos, this is easy to prove: food, shelter, life depend upon human treatment of the environment. The more spiritual connection to animal-plant-mountain, however, challenges our civilised sense of humanity. We tend to tread more warily.

Under the long, slow oversight of Cooroora Mountain, our small community experiments with such place-based expressions. Artists from around the world meet the gentle senses and beauteous vistas of the Sunshine Coast hinterland. The human community holds contemporary classical concerts here, celebrating Australian composers and their place-based connections. Locana have (twice) played pieces by Michael Hugh-Dixon, Kent Farbach, John Gilfedder. World premieres in a big blue shed. Meantime, the graceful tree frogs hold other concerts, celebrating rain with carefully choreographed choruses that fill the damp night air.

Why Art Matters

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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.

Select talks by Director, Cooroora Institute

talks

'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

Climate Change and Art

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If I say I love my place, what’s with the bags I’ve packed? The cultural changes required by landscape memoir and eco-regionalism[1]

Cultural change best responds to the eco-imperative when we learn to dance more wildly. The arts of the everyday help us develop and honour a collective love of place through both a joyous creativity and a re-imagining of the future. We need such conversations, not just between the disciplines of academics, but across us all – inexpert and expert alike. We need to invoke the role of the beast, the monster, and the furies, so that even scientists and planners (the upholders of rationality and predictability) might be introduced to the wild. We do need to travel more carefully, taking time to inhabit the skins of other places, but we do still need to travel so as to make the personal connections needed to share and decide globally. While the level of decision-making required by climate change may be global, the level of action needs to be local, reduced to the bioregion. But bioregionalism should not necessarily limit culture; it provides us with an opportunity to develop regional identity and embed ourselves through a sense of place. Ecoregionalism unifies this careful knowing of the more-than-human world along with the best of our human creativity and culture. Ecoregionalism offers the opportunities of human scale (a walkable place) that eco-modernism has discarded in its optimism for the global market. Ecoregionalism’s finest tools are drawn, not from the sciences, but from the arts.