Barbara Bickel
Fallen Tree Time
Fallen Tree Time by Barbara Bickel: camera, narration, vocals, editing
Location: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
The traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples, the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ.
Part of a series entitled "Skin of the Earth,"
all artworkings based on place-based trance and arts-based inquiry.
Location: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
The traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples, the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ.
Part of a series entitled "Skin of the Earth,"
all artworkings based on place-based trance and arts-based inquiry.
Artist Statement: A Restorative Art and Trance-Based Inquiry
I create relationally with humans and more-than-human beings through contemplative arts-based inquiry (Walsh, Bickel & Leggo, 2015). My artworkings are grounded in connective aesthetics (Gablik, 1995) and matrixial (Ettinger, 2006) dialogic processes. Working with matrixial interconnected aesthetics leads me to recognize that which requires attention, thus uncovering what has been passed over or repressed to engage in restorative and healing processes. This video delves into an art and trance-based inquiry undertaken at a small secluded inlet on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples, the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ, now known as Victoria on the Pacific West Coast of Canada.
The video aesthetically invites you to enter what geologist Henry Hess names “geopoetry,” an experience which allows us to “gain the gift of de-familiarization, becoming other to ourselves, as one expression of the ever-evolving planet” (McKay, 2013, p, 53).
As part of the arts-based methodology, I engage a practice of awake-dreaming (the use of trance and altered states) as a co-conscious inquiry on the land with more-than-human realms. I have come to teach and articulate this as “trance-based inquiry” (Bickel, 2020). This practice has roots in, among others, Modernist surrealist art (eg., Dali, Kahlo) through their practice of automatism, early 20th century American spiritualists through practices of mediumship and seances, and Indigenous Peoples in traditional spiritual and healing practices from around the world. Of “trance-based learning” indigenous educator Four Arrows (2016) wrote, “Changing from normal consciousness with the intent to better gain access to living in harmony is about connecting to and rebalancing subtle energies that surround and fill us. Trance-based learning is, in its various forms, how we bring such energies to a level of consciousness (n.p.).”
This particular artworking took place in a familiar geological environment, in the location of my growing up years in Canada. I grew up with the island time of rocks, trees, water, wind and sun. Interconnected with geologic time I believe each person has a bodied sense of time based on the particular landscapes they imprint themselves onto during significant years of their life. When in the time zone of my bodyprint, I experience a sense of home in a deeply sensorial way. When removed from these imprint sites I have to work more diligently to gain sensory awareness of a place. Arts and trance-based inquiry has become my practice of connecting and gaining new understandings of place and history wherever I find myself dwelling.
In this inquiry I joined with a healthy fallen tree, found walking distance from my mother’s home, and stepped into a profoundly deep state of time-fullness. A time outside of human time, outside of corporate institutional time, outside of neurotic addictive digital time. I titled the video artworking “Fallen Tree Time.” Seven years earlier “Fallen Tree” was the title of the first artworking I did in my newly set up studio at my new university. This artworking was a work of mourning. A visual metaphor for the uprootedness I felt from my home country of Canada as I took on the task of replanting myself in the foreign landscape of the Shawnee forest, the university and the culture of the American midwest. What I did not know was that fallen trees are an essential part of the forest ecology. Fallen trees in their state of decay become nursing logs as they host and nourish new plant and tree growth in the forest. In my roles as teacher, advisor and director for students and faculty in my academic programs, I recognized I had become a nursing log for the community I was living and working within.
During a sabbatical in 2015, temporarily released from my duties at the university, I encountered this fallen tree on Vancouver Island, growing horizontally out of the bedrock; fully alive and strong. Tree roots are flexible and can grow as needed with their environment. Laying my body easily on one of its’ smooth wide branches reaching out towards the water in the inlet, I experienced a profound sense of tree time, elemental time, geologic time. This healthy fallen tree became a nurse for me. It released me from human-centred time, which became a freedom with and beyond time—an experience of time-freedom outside the bondage of human fear of losing time. In my experience of time-freedom, the presence of origin was felt and recovered (Gebser, 1949/84). I love how neuroscientist David Eagleman (2011) describes time as “metasensory: it rides on top of all the others (n.p)” as “it stretches, compresses, skips a beat and doubles back (Bilger, 2011, n.p.).”
With much of contemporary Western “civilization” caught in a ‘bad dream,’ slowing down, stretching our senses and re-experiencing time outside of time to attune to the world through tranceworking, dreamworking and artworkings can be a reset for the uninspiring neoliberal/dominant worldview and our human entranced brains-- potentially inspiring us to dream in re-educative ways, re-storing reciprocal relations, and thus co-nourishing ourselves, our ancestors and the earth for future generations to come.
I create relationally with humans and more-than-human beings through contemplative arts-based inquiry (Walsh, Bickel & Leggo, 2015). My artworkings are grounded in connective aesthetics (Gablik, 1995) and matrixial (Ettinger, 2006) dialogic processes. Working with matrixial interconnected aesthetics leads me to recognize that which requires attention, thus uncovering what has been passed over or repressed to engage in restorative and healing processes. This video delves into an art and trance-based inquiry undertaken at a small secluded inlet on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples, the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ, now known as Victoria on the Pacific West Coast of Canada.
The video aesthetically invites you to enter what geologist Henry Hess names “geopoetry,” an experience which allows us to “gain the gift of de-familiarization, becoming other to ourselves, as one expression of the ever-evolving planet” (McKay, 2013, p, 53).
As part of the arts-based methodology, I engage a practice of awake-dreaming (the use of trance and altered states) as a co-conscious inquiry on the land with more-than-human realms. I have come to teach and articulate this as “trance-based inquiry” (Bickel, 2020). This practice has roots in, among others, Modernist surrealist art (eg., Dali, Kahlo) through their practice of automatism, early 20th century American spiritualists through practices of mediumship and seances, and Indigenous Peoples in traditional spiritual and healing practices from around the world. Of “trance-based learning” indigenous educator Four Arrows (2016) wrote, “Changing from normal consciousness with the intent to better gain access to living in harmony is about connecting to and rebalancing subtle energies that surround and fill us. Trance-based learning is, in its various forms, how we bring such energies to a level of consciousness (n.p.).”
This particular artworking took place in a familiar geological environment, in the location of my growing up years in Canada. I grew up with the island time of rocks, trees, water, wind and sun. Interconnected with geologic time I believe each person has a bodied sense of time based on the particular landscapes they imprint themselves onto during significant years of their life. When in the time zone of my bodyprint, I experience a sense of home in a deeply sensorial way. When removed from these imprint sites I have to work more diligently to gain sensory awareness of a place. Arts and trance-based inquiry has become my practice of connecting and gaining new understandings of place and history wherever I find myself dwelling.
In this inquiry I joined with a healthy fallen tree, found walking distance from my mother’s home, and stepped into a profoundly deep state of time-fullness. A time outside of human time, outside of corporate institutional time, outside of neurotic addictive digital time. I titled the video artworking “Fallen Tree Time.” Seven years earlier “Fallen Tree” was the title of the first artworking I did in my newly set up studio at my new university. This artworking was a work of mourning. A visual metaphor for the uprootedness I felt from my home country of Canada as I took on the task of replanting myself in the foreign landscape of the Shawnee forest, the university and the culture of the American midwest. What I did not know was that fallen trees are an essential part of the forest ecology. Fallen trees in their state of decay become nursing logs as they host and nourish new plant and tree growth in the forest. In my roles as teacher, advisor and director for students and faculty in my academic programs, I recognized I had become a nursing log for the community I was living and working within.
During a sabbatical in 2015, temporarily released from my duties at the university, I encountered this fallen tree on Vancouver Island, growing horizontally out of the bedrock; fully alive and strong. Tree roots are flexible and can grow as needed with their environment. Laying my body easily on one of its’ smooth wide branches reaching out towards the water in the inlet, I experienced a profound sense of tree time, elemental time, geologic time. This healthy fallen tree became a nurse for me. It released me from human-centred time, which became a freedom with and beyond time—an experience of time-freedom outside the bondage of human fear of losing time. In my experience of time-freedom, the presence of origin was felt and recovered (Gebser, 1949/84). I love how neuroscientist David Eagleman (2011) describes time as “metasensory: it rides on top of all the others (n.p)” as “it stretches, compresses, skips a beat and doubles back (Bilger, 2011, n.p.).”
With much of contemporary Western “civilization” caught in a ‘bad dream,’ slowing down, stretching our senses and re-experiencing time outside of time to attune to the world through tranceworking, dreamworking and artworkings can be a reset for the uninspiring neoliberal/dominant worldview and our human entranced brains-- potentially inspiring us to dream in re-educative ways, re-storing reciprocal relations, and thus co-nourishing ourselves, our ancestors and the earth for future generations to come.
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Fallen Tree Time
[Deep breath] With fallen tree I lay supported by embankment by rocks [Deep breath] Now reaching toward the embankment approaching tree roots wound around stones and earth roots solid grip keeping tree alive in near fallen statehood [Deep breath] With fallen tree I lay reach inward to earth outward to sun wrapped fingers wrapped limbs surround roots root bound and strong within bedrock of island encircled by turquoise salted water ionizing time [Deep breath] Time stone time tree time water time wind time circling spiraling traversing time time time time reversing time time time returning time time time time time turning down time time time time time time time time [Deep breath] Let fingers unfurl hold on roots let limbs unhinge let body wiggle out wiggle out to tree onto branch perfect branch for resting restoring gravity Thank you stone time Thank you fallen tree time Thank you water time Thank you wind time Thank you for holding human time within your greater time Thank you for holding human time within your greater time |
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Barbara Bickel Independent Artist Barbara Bickel, Ph.D. is an artist, researcher, writer, educator, curator and editor. An Emerita Associate Professor in Art Education, at Southern Illinois University she co-founded and co-directs Studio M*: A Collaborative Research Creation Lab Intersecting Arts, Culture and Healing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 2017, where she continues to teach and inquire through the arts as a life meaning making process. Her research interests include arts-based inquiry methods, a/r/tography, trance-based inquiry, collaboration, socially-engaged art, connective aesthetics, matrixial theory, feminist art and pedagogy, and restorative and transformative learning. A socially engaged and collaborative artist she maintains a multi-media studio and ritual performance practice and exhibits internationally. As a co-editor of Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal she practices editing as curating with compassion. As an author, her arts-based inquiry writing has been published in over 60 journals and book chapters. In 2015, she co-edited, with Susan Walsh and Carl Leggo, the book Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching: Honoring Precense. Her most recent book, published by Palgrave in 2020, is Art, Ritual and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World. Her arts-based writing calls us to embody and live matrixal, Earth-based feminist and Indigenous worldviews that celebrate and embrace womenfesting. |
References
Bickel, B. (2020). Art, ritual and trance Inquiry: Arational learning in an irrational world. Palgrave Macmillan.
Bilger, Burkhard. (2011). The Possibilian. New Yorker Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian
Ettinger, Bracha L. (2006). The matrixial borderspace.University of Minnesota Press.
Four Arrows (2016). Point of departure: Returning to our authentic worldview for education and survival. Information Age.
Gablik, S. (1995). Connective aesthetics: Art after individualism. In S. Lacy (Ed.), Mapping the terrain: New genre public art (pp. 74-87). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Gebser, Jean (1949/1984). The ever-present origin (N. Barstad, & A. Mickunas, Trans.). Ohio University Press.
Hess, Henry. H. (1961, Nov). History of ccean basins. Petrologic Studies: In E. J. Engel, H. L. James & B. F. Leonard (Eds.), A volume to honor A. F. Buddington (pp. 599-620). Geological Society of America. https://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/hist_oceanogr/hess-history-of-ocean-basins.pdf
McKay, Don. (2013). Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a reader of deep time. In E. Ellsworth & J. Kruse (Eds.). Making the geological now: Responses to material conditions of contemporary life (pp. 46-53). Punctum.
Walsh, S., Bickel, B., & Leggo, C. (Eds.). (2015). Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honoring presence. Routledge.
Bickel, B. (2020). Art, ritual and trance Inquiry: Arational learning in an irrational world. Palgrave Macmillan.
Bilger, Burkhard. (2011). The Possibilian. New Yorker Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian
Ettinger, Bracha L. (2006). The matrixial borderspace.University of Minnesota Press.
Four Arrows (2016). Point of departure: Returning to our authentic worldview for education and survival. Information Age.
Gablik, S. (1995). Connective aesthetics: Art after individualism. In S. Lacy (Ed.), Mapping the terrain: New genre public art (pp. 74-87). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
Gebser, Jean (1949/1984). The ever-present origin (N. Barstad, & A. Mickunas, Trans.). Ohio University Press.
Hess, Henry. H. (1961, Nov). History of ccean basins. Petrologic Studies: In E. J. Engel, H. L. James & B. F. Leonard (Eds.), A volume to honor A. F. Buddington (pp. 599-620). Geological Society of America. https://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/hist_oceanogr/hess-history-of-ocean-basins.pdf
McKay, Don. (2013). Ediacaran and Anthropocene: Poetry as a reader of deep time. In E. Ellsworth & J. Kruse (Eds.). Making the geological now: Responses to material conditions of contemporary life (pp. 46-53). Punctum.
Walsh, S., Bickel, B., & Leggo, C. (Eds.). (2015). Arts-based and contemplative practices in research and teaching: Honoring presence. Routledge.