Tending Ecologies is a workshop series about caring for the land around us and the landscape of our bodies.
The health of our bodies and the health of the Earth are inextricably intertwined, which has been forgotten in many ways due to colonization severing this connection. Workshop participants will engage with ideas of release, nourishment, attention, and renewal in resonance with Earthly cycles and practices of bioremediation, bioregional herbalism, ethnobotany, ecological art and sound, and healing arts.
In addition to its focus on embodied practices, each workshop will include discussions oriented toward unraveling and unlearning ingrained colonial structures that cause separation from our bodies and the Earth, and exploring the ways we can come back into right relationship. Part of this relationship-building will weave through ecological listening to the acoustics of soil, while monitoring the changes in the soil’s health resulting from hands-on bioremediation.
As a part of the ecosystem we reside in, remediating-remedying the inheritances of our internal and external environments is an act of resistance and resilience. By listening more deeply to the soil, the plants, our bodies, and the cycles of the Earth we move with, we learn and remember the ways that we can tend to life itself.
Workshops
- Release ~ Bioremediation………………………………………………………………………………….January 31
- Nourishment ~ Composting and Soil Health……………………………………………February 7
- Attention ~ Native Plant Identification and Botanical Art………………..March TBD
- Renewal ~ Seed Saving and Seed Starting……………………………………………..TBD
About the Artist
Paige Emery is an ecological artist and herbalist exploring ways of remembering the Earth. Her work interweaves healing arts and critical ecology, ancestral memory and embodied futurities, ecopoetics and socioenvironmental praxis. As a way of life, her practice is rooted in reciprocity with the Earth.
Paige’s practice stems from a background in art, herbalism, ancestral medicine, eco-philosophy, environmentalism, and learning from the Earth. Her work serves as a bridge between the internal and external landscapes of ecological consciousness through guided plant rituals, multispecies installations, ecopoetic meditations, embodied ecology walks, herbal healing sessions, music soundscapes for more-than-human connection, and sharing plant remedies with her community.
Previous works include art installations for more-than-human time at Biosphere 2, Arizona; multispecies ecopoetics at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; sonic meditations at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; plant rituals for memory gardens at Biennale Gherdëina, Italy; Kamayan ceremonies with Active Cultures x The Brick for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, presented by Getty; guerrilla gardens with houseless neighbors as acts of resistance and care at Echo Park Lake; guided decolonial ecology walks with the Fowler Museum; and her plant remedies for resilience between worlds at Earth Medicine Apothecary.
PaigeEmery.com
