Collaborations & Explorations
In Flower Community
Poems and Musical Improvisations for Native Plants
“In Flower Community: Poems and Musical Improvisations for Native Plants” gathered people and plants in co-creative celebration and a transformation of the soundscape to mark the ecosystem restoration of Missouri Flat Creek. Influenced by Natasha Myers' concept of the Planthropocene as a means to “seeding sovereignty” with plants and “growing a livable world” through co-creative conjuring, the event, a collaboration with instrumentalists with the School of Music at Washington State University, highlighted botanical signage featured in the Plant Poems Project and invited participants to collaborate through human voice, instrumental music, and attunement to plants.
2022
The Plant Poems Project
The Plant Poems Project involved collaborative research in ecology, botany, and Indigneous approaches plant kinship and the creation of poems featured on botanical signage for each of 20 native plants selected for an urban creek habitat restoration in downtown Pullman, WA.
2021
Creek Studies
Studies of various creeks in the spring and summer of 2020 laid the groundwork for ”With Táamsas” and a collaboration with visual artist and poet Daniel Molnar, dear places therein.
2020
EcoArts on the Palouse
The Palouse is most widely known for the vast rolling hills of wheat and lentils that straddle the border of Washington and Idaho. EcoArts on the Palouse is an ongoing archive of exploratory encounters that begins with the question What if we focus on the wild edge spaces is creeks, prairie remnants and forests? If we reweave these fragments through ecological knowledge and creative and healing arts, what new connections might arise?
Inviting community collaboration since 2017
River Mapping
Imaginative Geography
“RIVER MAPPING: Imaginative Geography” draws together poems from Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman, 2015) with natural fiber collages by Annie Cunningham, soundscape design by Krista Brand and digital imagery light boxes by Amelia Warden. Exhibited in Points of Interest: Reflections on Place through WSU Faculty and the Museum Collection at Washington State University Museum of Art.
2017
Groundworks
A Collaborative Lab
“Groundworks” featured co-creation of an immersive site-based alternative to conventional academic panels during the 2013 Berkeley Conference on Ecopoetics. Prompted by written “provocations” (by Jolie Kaytes, Laura Mullen, Linda Russo, and Hazel White) arboreal engagement unfolded in the eucalyptus grove near Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus.
Photos by Jen Coleman.
2013
The Confluence
Counter-Mapping a Radical Poetics of Place
Photographic studies and myriad walks along the confluence of the South Fork of the Palouse River and Paradise Creek formed groundwork for poems collected in Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman Books, 2015). “The Confluence: Counter-Mapping a Radical Poetics of Place,” an essay in geopoetics, appeared in Curating the Cosmos, edited by Elizabeth Straughan, Philip J. Nicholson, and Eric Magrane (2013).
2012
Remnant Work
This ongoing arts-based research project commenced in the spring of 2019 with the question of whether it is possible to visit every remnant of native Palouse Prairie, of which there are thousands. It continues in photographs and field notes, prose and poems, growing intimacy with grasses, trees and flowering plants, rocks, lichens, mosses and soils, to explore knowledge surviving in fragments. Every visit, every encounter, part of a healing journey and a desire to know what it is to be in ancient belonging.
the bone that didn’t break returned more gently
to remind you to heal
can we do this together? can we reach for the hand extended in warmth
I don’t know how to know if I’ve found them
but trust us
the heart is a three dimensional being
expanding out and out
to be present for what needs you
unknowing