2022 Calendar: Lessons in Transforming

The Calendar is approximately 8.5”x10.5” and printed on thick card stock with a durable wire binding.

“Science asks us to learn about organisms. Traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them”. 

-Robin Wall Kimmerer

Hi community.  This artwork is exploring how transformation happens in the more-than-human world.  What is the pace? the scale? the intelligence? What are the catalysts? the resources?  The plants and animals are powerful teachers and offer abundant examples of how to live a cooperative and interconnected life. Pollination (Movement), Metamorphosis (Re-forming), Germination (Growth), and Decomposition (Death) are the processes of transformation that I focus on. Each monthly page includes some descriptions of the illustrations and an invitation to consider how these processes are relevant to our own human experiences.

What prompted this project?

As a white woman who grew up on the unceded lands of the Abenaki Nation - also known as Vermont - my socialization did not offer lessons or rituals about how to be in relationship with the land around me.  Without knowing ways to create a reciprocal connection with place, I have felt both curiosity and a sense of disconnection since I was young.  As I continue to grow and learn, this curiosity and disconnection have given way to deep grief that gets louder and larger each year I am alive.  Like an onion, each layer I peel back reveals another intentional barrier built by a human-centered worldview.  I know these kinds of views are not held by all human beings.  

This project is an invitation for you to join me in interrogating the views that lead to a disconnection with nature. adrienne marie brown explains the harm these views perpetuate. “The focus on dominance over the living rather than partnership with life is how we have racism, rape culture, climate catastrophe, economic disparity, war and disease all in rampant disaster states at the same time.”

As daunting and disheartening as this statement might feel, to me it illustrates the stakes we are contending with and helps me gain clarity and purpose.  In order to heal any broken relationship and move forward, I believe It is important to know the shape and the depth of the break we are tending.  The wounds I am looking at in myself come from the lessons I was given by white supremacy culture, colonization, and capitalism. For me, part of the medicine to repair and transform that damage looks like being an attentive student to the plants, animals and ecosystems that are my neighbors. What wounds do you carry and what medicinal practices are you drawn to?

Thanks for considering this with me.