Good Neighbour Crows - 2024 03 23

 Mylar, pencil crayon, pen, acrylic and ink

I'm thinking about the ecological integrity of a natural landscape and what it means to be a human and also be part of that landscape. I'm fascinated by relationships and how my own experience and knowledge of the world is in a state of constant co-creation with my surroundings. 

I live a fairly solitary and simple life these days. Looking after Mom structures my days and the possibilities of how I may express my creativity. 

My creativity is my process of sense-making, of making sense of what I am experiencing. My experiences are a endlessly inflected by my personal, and also my social and cultural history. These histories - the stories my life - are contradictory, baffling, and confusing. The stories of my life do not fit into a tidy tv series or a convoluted movie plot. In fact, I rarely see evidence of my own historical narrative in mainstream or even sub-stream media.

From a social and cultural historical perspective, the work of women was not considered worth writing about. And so, the work of women was made invisible. That invisibility continues to harm women and the value of their work today. 

Similarly, historical social and cultural narratives of nature and ecological systems has been a story of dominance, subjugation and exploitation. As if the river, the tree, the fox or the mountain, did not also have rights to exist, to be known, to be respected.

I feel a sense of shared destiny in my relationship to nature in my local neighbourhood. I'm thinking about fostering ecological integrity in all my affairs. My good neighbour crows bring humour, pathos, and a way to make sense of all the permutations of relationships that are integral to living a modest, highly demanding, and highly constrained life.