Multispecies intimacy in the age of extinction: the birth of ‘Arctic swell’ and fictions of ‘SYLVAN’

Arctic Swell

I’m a membrane
The chest might be tight at night
As the shallow breath diverts the trajectories of the asteroids

I’m a membrane
Let’s watch the Leonids shower the sky There’s ice
There’s dust
There’s rocky particles
Let’s rock let’s rock
I’ll rock you

I’m a membrane
The delicate are the strong The raw and tender are whole
I’m a membrane
The nutrients seep through
The light enters
There’s tenderness,
There’s care,
There’s a mountain at the end of this road

I carry you
You grow
I carry you
You grow
I carry you
I grow.

(Glasgow, self-published, 2022)

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that I am writing this five years to the day since the event. This time five years ago I was shedding a skin, in fact, shedding a body-mind, turning inside out, performing a magical act of connecting us into a network. Nothing was ever the same again, and it wasn’t the lens or the filter I was looking through; it was the very fabric of the world that shifted by a molecule or an atom to welcome us into the biosphere. Nothing could embody the idea of radical intimacy better than growing another human inside for me. The cells! The hormones. The temporary organ. Society and the various ways it lets you down. The community and various ways it lifts you up. Blood tests, ultrasounds, dopplers, blood and other fluids, the physicality of stretching skin and beyond religious experience of splitting, becoming two, to never to return to your primal state again. This metamorphosis of life, embodied through every physical sense from taste to touch, destroying the last illusion of the body-mind separation and shattering the idea of individuality, and with it free will, all concepts we have been basing our culture on for the past long while, introduced new connections and networks to explore and live with. In Arctic Swell, my body of work from 2020 to 2022, I explored this metamorphosis with the help of cameras, words, drones and sounds. It resulted in darkened exhibition spaces with glowing light boxes, shimmering digital landscapes on translucent textiles, words and lullabies filling the space. I wove in solastalgia, snow and bees, linden trees, digital networks, photogrammetric landscapes, sauna rituals, microscopic lichen images and seaweed jelly objects. The intimacy running through the work looks close up at the mammary gland cells contracting in reaction to oxytocin filmed in the lab of Dr. Felicity M. Davis at the University of Aarhus, and tells an under-slept slightly hallucinogenic story of gut microbiome, atoms buzzing like linden trees in July, trajectories of celestial bodies, breastfeeding, gentle touch and the interconnectedness of all things in nature, yes, including digital landscapes, trucks on motorways, mould on white bathroom tiles, birch seeds scattered through the kitchen window, hormonal fluctuations. Forests and snowy fields were observed through the eye of a drone, scanned and recreated as distorted 3D landscapes, recognisable as “nature” but not “natural”. Relationships rather than objects or subjects themselves take centre stage in Arctic Swell. Symbiotic, close or distant, parasitic, communal, they are ever changing and through these relationships Arctic Swell was built into a four-chapter video work, a Lightbox installation and a publication of texts and images.

Ecological polycrisis and related anxiety requires new ways of thinking. Arctic Swell acted as a springboard to further explore the themes of interconnectedness, metamorphoses, the biology of an individual. Holobionts, composites, chimeras entered the stage where timescales stretched and contracted, and the scale of objects changed dizzyingly. Reading the writings of Lyn Margulis, Scott F Gilbert, Ursula Le Guin and then further science fiction delights by Jeff VanderMeer, paved way for SYLVAN – a work in progress written as a dialogue in letters in between two European forests: primeval Bialowieza in Poland and the remains of the Caledonian forests of Scotland. The plurality of life and its entanglements needed a new form, and SYLVAN is an ongoing attempt to allow science fiction narrative to unravel in text, objects and photographs. Working with curators of zoology and entomology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, I started a catalogue of specimens, then further developed sculptural objects and together with video footage from both forests and the text, SYLVAN is shaping up to be a fictional piece on multispecies intimacy in the age of extinction.

Letter 01

Dear beloved
We are sparking rotting digesting winds of the few seasons have offered us many fallen trees.
A feast of trunks. The pull of the fallen maple and linden. We crawl, we feed, we multiply, we turn the layers over and over, enmeshing us in this beautiful digestion, the season for fruiting , for cranes circling in the upper sphere calling their (our) sad calls above the crowns of kingdoms.
Decompose us gently when the time comes.
Digest us transform, us let us become new whilst being old, a dance of spores and pollen an enzyme until we slowly organic carbon again: fleshy, squirming , swarming rot.
This was a good cycle for, the oaks bearing the weight of the fruit, floor alive with of all families, squirrelling away, mousing away, wild-boaring away the supplies.
The nights are stretching out again. The end of the chlorophyll celebrations setting the crowns ablaze with colour.
A stewing of sugars, a bubbling of glucose, we prepare for fertile death.
Do you receive? Give us a sign.