Nomadic Inquiry

From January to July 2015 my creative life partner R. Michael Fisher and I embarked on a nomadic journey and I became a blogger. In July 2017 we entered a new juncture of nomadic travelling-- returning to Canada after 9 years of living in the USA. Earlier blogs are archived here. To see recent blogs go to art-ritual-trance-inquiry.tumblr.com

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My last blog post was about my experience of teaching workshops at the feminist arts festival outside of Chicago, Illinois. That was in May! Now it is October. The summer was busy finding a new home we love in the neighbourhood of Bridgeland in Calgary, Alberta and with preparing for a fall open house, art installation and teaching out of Studio M*. Michael and I are no longer nomads housing-wise but continue with the spirit of inviting travelers/seekers into our lives, home and studio space. We are very happy to have unboxed our library and have named it the 920A Live-In Library. Aligning ourselves with the home library/tiny library movement that is spreading. We have made it an open library every Friday evening and have had neighbours we do not know find our brochure at local shops and drop in. We see this as an extension of Studio M* and an on-going socially-engaged art project.

We have just begun teaching Trance-Based Learning and Inquiry classes out of Studio M* with a desire to assist each other in consciously entering altered states of consciousness rather than being hypnotized without awareness by the culture we are embedded in. Alongside the teaching, which has turned into hybrid cyber/in-person classes I am researching for and writing a book on Trance and Art. The “playwork” assignment we gave to our co-inquiry and learning participants this week was to go on an “awake sleep-walk” and to practice walking with what Indigenous-based educator Four Arrows calls “Concentration Activated Transformation” or CAT as a practice that can take us into trance states. So I went on my CAT walk today and on my return I crossed the path of an historic cat in Calgary. One of four lions that were one of the first pieces of public art in Calgary 101 years ago and originally installed on the Centre St Bridge, connecting the north and south sides of the city. As the only restored of the four original lions the cat I encountered is now installed in a park near my home. The lions are a thread back to Canadian colonial history as they are replicas of lions found in London, England and were a celebration of the Britain-Calgary connection in the aftermath of WWI. 

Today as I engaged the ancient Indigenous human practice of trance that has been suppressed in colonial education systematically, my encounter with this restored lion reminds me of the initial changes taking place in Canada, with an effort to Indigenize education. Beyond teaching the tragic history of colonization of Indigenous peoples, incorporating Indigenous wisdom teachings and their understanding of how to live and be in ecological balance is required to restore the earth. If we restore Indigenous worldview teachings in education maybe them can our educational systems potentially lead us out of the destructive mass-hypnosis the dominant Western world is caught in. “Restoration,” Indigenous botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her book Braiding Sweetgrass “is a powerful antidote to despair.” This summer I was fortunate to introduce trance-based learning and inquiry to educators in a summer intensive university class on Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and Teaching. That I can be teaching this work inside as well as outside of institutions is a restorative opportunity. Restoring one lion and reinstating CAT in a park on the natural escarpment of the river rather than on a man-made concrete bridge I can read as a message from the more-than-rational world of trance as a walk in the right direction. 

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When I moved to the State of Illinois in 2008 to teach art at Southern Illinois University, the then governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich was at the tail-end of a destructive leadership ride and about to be sentenced to 14 years in prison on corruption charges. George W. Bush was in his last year of a presidency that had declared a never-ending war on America that to this day shows no signs of peace anywhere, and I learned that women were not included in the American constitution - needing three more States to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and Illinois was one of them. As a Canadian who had managed to keep politics to the very edges of my life living in docile Canada, I was now deeply embedded in what felt like a political nightmare while teaching for a state university where political decisions decided whether students could get financial aide to enable them to study and whether I would have a pension, among other things. The last four years in Illinois I directed the University Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. One of the first such programs in the US, this program steadily grew over 30 some years but also systematically lost its funding. After my retirement I was not replaced and have yet to hear that the directorship position will be replaced, as administration is no longer willing to make it a paid position.

In my last semester in the US in 2009 I traveled to an artist residency in Egypt where I gave a presentation on the history of feminist art in North American. I shared with a shocked Egyptian audience of artists and art professors that the USA constitution did not hold equal rights for women. I facilitated a Nap-In and a Trance-Based Inquiry workshop in Alexandria to a receptive group of Egyptian art students and faculty, some of whom had been part of the Arab Spring uprising. On arriving back in Illinois, just after International Women’s Day, I was contacted by the communication director of my university asking if state funding had been given to the Nap-in and art installation that had just been installed at the university. F_X News had picked up the story and would run two slamming segments on F_X and Friends condemning and ridiculing the university and students for taking part in Nap-Ins, creating and sharing art expressing their dreams for diversity. The university was responding to the accusation that tax payers money had been given to enable students to nap for course credit (see earlier blog on this). 

America thus transformed me into a “slow activist” and a reluctant American citizen (I obtained my US citizenship while living there through my dad, who was American Canadian). I now am a Canadian American artist, researcher and teacher with renewed commitment to assisting all people to access their inner wisdom and connectedness to themselves, their community, their home place and the more than human worlds through radically slowed-down-creation-generating-processes like Nap-Ins and Trance-Based Inquiry practices.

One year after leaving the US I am invited back by a former art student (thank you Natalie Pivoney!) to exhibit art and offer workshops at the 8th annual Going Dutch Festival in Elgin, Illinois (just outside of Chicago). This festival began as a festival that would alternate each year showcasing the creative dance work of men and women, hence its name. As it turned out, after the first year the men left the organizing team and so it has continued as a women’s event, supported by some amazing men but run and mostly attended by generous, passionate and articulate women. Partaking in this festival offered me the opportunity to return to the Illinois with the Dream Scroll and to offer a Nap-In (one of the Gestare Art Collective’s creative practices)  and Trance workshop under radically different circumstances - in a supportive women-led arts festival.

I spent my 5 days in Elgin meeting energized, creative and smart women, most young women in their twenties, passionate about sharing their experiences and love for others with the world through their art practices. I attended a beautiful slow breath and movement workshop with Emily Navarra and Eric SmackDab of The Movement Kitchen and became part of a “Body Choir.” I attended the premier screening of a GD commissioned dance film by Talia Koylass entitled “The Good Christian” and had conversations with the dancers and choreographer about the importance of young women reclaiming their spiritual paths within the traditional Black Christian church community. I witnessed so many different dance forms, so many different bodies choreographed in powerful and tender expressive motion. Among them Rosie Trump’s With or Without Dance performers who carried me through the piece Fill in the Blank, transforming ordinary chairs into moving fluid architectural magic. I experienced critically informed performance artists such as conceptual dream performers Maddy Rager and Scott Crandall of Thanks You So Much For Coming who caused me to laugh and think simultaneously, and Brandy A. Rogers an artist teaching and story-telling through words and song. It was through Brandy’s performance that I “got” how Black Americans have decolonized the white Christian God from the God as judge and fear God story that I grew up with in the Missouri Lutheran church to the God is Love story. A powerful appropriation of the white Christian religion within a community who understands from their years of on-going oppression in the world of white supremacy that love trumps all and so love is truly God. Best of all though was being able to talk with many of these young artists and choreographers, discovering their passion and desire to deepen and extend their work and messages for their country and the world. Some joined me in my workshops and opened themselves up to the dangerous space of slowness, going inside to find and activate forgotten or repressed dreams and visions. To re-meet themselves in realms beyond cultural and political constraints through reclaiming trance and dream as a human storehouse of self-authorizing awareness and knowing.

And the final best aspect of the festival is how the connections generated in this festival will reverberate, some silently, slowly, others loudly and quickly into the future. A future that concurrently finds the current US president signaling that he will commute the sentence of Blagojevich, and the same week finding the State of Illinois approving the Equal Rights Amendment, 36 years late. May the future bring that one more needed State ERA approval forward (Nevada showed up with theirs last year) to enable the United States of America constitution to take the political blinders off and recognize and celebrate half of its population, try going dutch, and possibly begin the slide towards the recovery and healing of a country in much pain. A country so desperately in need of the love-based, gift-based, compassionate democracy that is visible in the lives and creative work of the many Americans I met in Elgin, Illinois. I return home to Canada feeling love for America and its people, for my sisters and brothers who are working hard to de-hypnotize their country from the escalating world-traumatizing nightmare we are all living, playing, struggling, working and creating within.

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On a cool early spring day on Vancouver Island I travel with my colleague and friend Pamela Richardson to the Victoria Shambhala Meditation Centre where her art and poetry exhibition with Susan Walsh is on display. Before we see the art she takes me on a tour of the main hall. I am greeted by a spacious high ceiling room with waxed hardwood floors, for seating many meditators, surrounded by large windows looking out to vibrant greenery. 

Leaving the great hall Pamela leads me into the small meditation room with its cushioned benches framing the room and above which their art is installed. "Endless open heart” are the words that lay bare the art installation which includes Renga poetry, a collaborative poetic form developed by poet-monks composing collaboratively in 14th century Japan, and Mitsang photography, a practice of seeing with eyes wide open.

Susan’s Mitsang photographs open my eyes to the moment of the image found in the midst of the collaborative poetic voice of Pamela and Susan in the Renga poem. Susan's poetic imagery is integrated within the written stanza’s. As I move slowly around the meditation room I find myself slipping into the many poignant retrieved moments of daily life embedded with such care in the poetic writing. I am grateful for the offering of these intimate co-encounters as they lead me into a felt sense of the practice of sitting mindfully, of being dipped into the preciousness of daily life with all of its unpretentious moments. 

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I love that I open this book and it begins with an art image before any text from a photography series by Lexi Lasczik Cutcher who is co-editor of this edited book on arts-based educational research with Linda Knight. This is the first book in the series with Springer that has been a labour of love for an editorial board made up of artists, scholars and educators and myself. A special thanks to Sun Kim for providing the cover art art images. Below is my editor-in-chief introduction to the book. Published by Springer Dec. 2017.

New Connections and Directions for Arts, Research, Education: An Orientation

As I was about to bring my term as Chair of the Arts Based Educational Research Special Interest Group (ABER SIG) at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) term to an end in 2012, I was invited by Springer editor Jolanda Voogd to submit a proposal for a book series in the field of Arts Based Educational Research. Aware of the international conversation on ABER poised to take off, and with a desire to develop the field in a truly interdisciplinary fashion with this international press I gathered a wise editorial team around the series and thus began the extended dialogic process of developing a proposal for the series. What became clear as we worked on the proposal and the purpose and scope for the series was that the vantage point we wanted to forefront was the hinge of education that connects the arts and research in the ever morphing and developing field of Arts-Based Educational Research. It is fitting that the first book published in the series, by Australian-based co-editors Linda Knight and Lexi Lasczik Cutcher, takes on the connecting points between arts, research, and education in this thoughtfully edited, richly researched, and written volume.

Knight and Lasczik Cutcher bring together a diversity of international authors into a rich portfolio that they describe as giving “voice to a decidedly non-North American-centric authorship” in the field. The multiple authors in the volume unhinge and re-hinge our understandings of art, education and research throughout the chapters culminating in a rich array of philosophical, theoretical, and practice-based approaches to ABER. It is with great excitement that I welcome you to travel the pages of this book and engage the internationally fed discussion of ABER scholarship.

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Lucid Transmissions is a collaboratively made artwork created with my life partner R. Michael Fisher. It is a mixed media 3 x 2 ft artwork on canvas that incorporates the following materials; acrylic paint, pencil crayon, ink, paper, tissue, thread, fabric, balsam tree bark and buds, lichen and tumbled stones.  Upon my return last October from my solo artist residency in Banff, I entered Studio M* to find that Michael had brought a 9 foot fallen limb from a local balsam poplar tree into the studio. Having made a commitment to spontaneously play with each other in the studio, we began to play with this tree. This artwork is the second creative interaction with the limb. The artworking began when we took the bark off and collaged pieces of it onto a black gesso-painted canvas. Thus began the almost 3 month processual back and forth aesthetic dialogue with each other and the artworking through the oracular medium of creativity. It draws from each of our aesthetic and formal skills but is a unique outcome that does not resemble either of us as individual artists. It has been a grounding relational practice of recovery for us as a couple post-academic institutional life. We will be co-inquiring more deeply and writing further about the process. The found poem below, inspired by 3 philosopher’s quotes and the artwork is the first textual entry into our arts-based co-inquiry. The original quotes were chosen somewhat randomly prior to working on the art. 

Ludic Transmissions

Every instinct carries within itself a power of variation, ludic, in the widest sense of the word

Adaptation never comes without inventiveness. Expressivity and creativity are the cutting edge of the genesis of forms of life.... instinct          sensitive to the relations between particular elements composing the lived situation

War is everywhere and nowhere. It wants to see human bodies spread out on the same plane, at its direct disposal, sometimes cutting down possibilities of movement, sometimes           opening them up

I and non-I, realizes the passage, onto a matrixial screen of vision, interwoven psychic imprints, traces and waves, from what is otherwise—either irredeemably lost or a potentiality, not-yet-born

Procedure or object, a phantasm         filtered inside trauma appears as its trace, … this assemblage is not private nor individual....

Shared subjectivity and trans-subjective-objects open aesthetic channels for transmissions, exchange and inscriptions via artworks, but it is artworking that offers this sphere          the means for seizing itself

Barbara Bickel & R. Michael Fisher, January 2018

Found Poem with text in the following order from:

R. Ruyer found in B. Massumi. What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Durham: Duke University Press. 2014 pp. 13-14

Virtanen & Vahamaki. The Structure of Change: An Introduction. Ephermera Journal, Vol. 5(10), 2005, p. 665.

Ettinger, B L. Beauty and trauma. (extract from “Beauty and wound:

Trans-subjectivity in art” colloque Art et Clinique. Mac-Mus?e de Marseille,

BLE Atelier. Retrieved August 20, 2010 from http://www.thing.net/eyebeam/ msg00403. html. 1998.

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Recognizing Each Other Through Art, Ritual, and Dreams “Keep your soul present to what we are being instructed in at this time, because out of the darkness comes so much breakthrough, it is a gestation period, a time of creativity.”

“Ritual is so important for the psyche and cosmos connecting again.” Matthew Fox

This blog is inspired by women’s “truth telling.” It invokes a remembering of the power of women’s voices joined in unison for the healing of our wounded world.

Releasing our indigenous selves through dreams, rituals and the creation of sacred objects is explored by Sarah Kerr, a ritualist, artist and death doula, I recently met in Calgary. Her dissertation (2012) reveals the initiation journey as a shamanic inquiry. She wrote in her abstract: “What can be learned by attending to the intersecting experiences of dreams, rituals, and the creation and use of sacred objects? Underlying this question is a deeper interest in what happens when a dreamer/ritualist/artist attempts to channel healing energy between the worlds on behalf of another person, a process that was discovered to be shamanic in nature.”

Early this fall, during my residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, I met an interdisciplinary Australian artist, Yantra de Vilder, who wrote her dissertation (2016) on the artistic moment of Ma, building upon her masters thesis on trance and art. An excerpt from her abstract:

"[this study] investigates and analyses the processes that can be used in recording, rehearsal and performance to create a state that goes beyond time and personality – a between place, a space [she] refer[s] to as the Artistic Moment and view[s] through the lens of the Japanese concept of Ma.”

Yantra enters the gateway into the creative trance state through collaboration and improvisation.

My long time friend and colleague Nané Jordan, an artist, writer, scholar and birth doula, also wrote a sacred arts and ritual infused dissertation (2011) on the curriculum of a women’s spirituality graduate program. She wrote in her abstract:

"The woman-centred curriculum re-claims women’s history, pre-history, spiritual experience, social contributions and creative expressions by integrating scholarly research, feminist perspectives and analysis, goddesses, activism, ritual, spiritual practices, and the arts. Through individual and collective processes of self-inquiry, healing and transformation, faculty and students contribute to new knowledge and social practices that can holistically address local and global challenges of gender, social and ecological justice. This dissertation artfully illuminates intersections of spirituality and feminism in education that remain little known or understood.”

As I engage with these women's creative, ritual and academic work in this Solstice season of the dark, I am prompted to return to my own dissertation which explored similar ideas with a group of 13 women spiritual leaders. What evolved in the mindful co-a/r/tographic study (2008) with these women of differing faith traditions was a relational worldview where we each transcended our individual spiritual and religious identities, and regarded and held each other as sacred aspects of the Divine. We came to this through the practice of ritual and trance inquiry, art-making and performing together. It was a powerful life enriching and at times exhausting undertaking taken on within the secular institution of the University.

Walking and making labyrinths became my grounding practice that has continued for me. The labyrinth itself is a multi-faith symbol that reaches across cultures and times, as far back as the neolithic and bronze age. The labyrinth became an in-between women’s curricular Ma place for the women and I to enter trance and re-attune with our indigenous selves, and to recognize our Divine selves in each other.

Interestingly, each of the women whose dissertations I have introduced, live with an inter-spiritual understanding of the world that informs their art and ritual practices. I am inspired and moved by these studies and their teachings that create open and respectful recognition of all beings that interrelate in a global worldview of mutuality.

Recently I have been exploring the generic aspects of the Indigenous Worldview through the work of Four Arrows, as my life partner Michael is completing an intellectual biography on Four Arrow's life work (to be published by Peter Lang early 2018). Four Arrows is an artist, activist and teacher who is calling for trance-based learning within education systems as a practice that can take us from fear to fearlessness.

If we do not harness our indigenous selves and engage with the wisdom of ritual and trance-based inquiry and learning we are fated as a people to be hypnotized by forces that are evil. Our house is steeped in reflective, and sometimes fear-filled conversations on what is happening in the world and what appears to be a future with less and less sustainability. We talk about the world, and both its desires and needs in these days of lost truth/trust/respect and care for/with the other. The daily globally fed and growing worry and collective fear with its lack of compassion and care for the other is so very present in the current political climate. I am riveted by the "truth telling" being revealed in mainstream media, spoken by women-- causing the twisted patriarchy to bow to the truth of their abuse of power and their use of fear to control and hurt women and ultimately all beings, human and non-human.

As these women artist scholars share, now is the time for entering the time/space of Ma, to dream and channel healing energy on behalf of others, for knowing ourselves and each other as Indigenous, as Divine. We are surely set for major reclaiming of a relational way of learning and unlearning. The good and beautiful work in each dissertation study above independently offers a reminder and a pathway to decolonize ourselves from the colonization of our spirits by a very toxic and out of balance Western worldview and imperialist democracy.

In my current place of life integration I find myself returning to the rich and at times provocative work unearthed over the years in the company of mostly women. I am remembering and I am listening. I invite others to remember and listen in this time of such needed wide awakeness, re-teaching, change and transformation.

In closing, I gather a collective blanket of poetic words to wrap ourselves in from these four provocative teaching and healing studies. A prayer shawl to support the telling of truth that is emerging from more and more women in the world.

Women experience walking the pilgrimage, entering ritual multiple realms of knowing and not knowing of being and beingness that spirit, through art leads us to

collaborative meetings facilitate and expand the moment reverberant in-between zones imbued with pressure and release juxtapositions of tension and surrender can result in spiritual and creative emergence undertaking the mysterious work of the sacred

dreaming is a primary channel communication between the worlds a practice through which human dreamers can help facilitate the flow of healing energy into this world

rewiring the senses is laden with contradictions not easy work

communion and transmission instances of transport between self and other when larger meaning is grasped and the interrelation of lives becomes apparent/transparent

We see ourselves in the other no matter the differences I am not alone in this work, I cannot do this work alone

Found Poem by Barbara Bickel

with excerpts found in the dissertations of: Yantra de Vilder, Nané Ariadne Jordan, Sarah Kerr, & Barbara Bickel

References

Bickel, Barbara. Living the divine spiritually and politically: Art, ritual, and performative pedagogy in women’s multi-faith leadership. Unpublished dissertation. Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia, 2008, p.7.  

de Vilder, Yantra. Towards the artistic moment: A personal exploration at the nexus of improvised inter-disciplinary and cross- cultural collaborative performance through the metaphor of Ma. Unpublished dissertation. Western Sydney University, 2016, p. 11.

Fox, Matthew. Science and spirituality: Together again. Retrieved Dec. 27, 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYSdHWG2Ao Jordan, Nané Ariadne. Inspiriting the academy: weaving stories and practices of living women's spirituality. Unpublished dissertation. Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia, 2011, p. 35.  

Kerr, Sarah. Dreams, rituals, and the creation of sacred objects: An inquiry into a contemporary western shamanic initiation. Unpublished dissertation. California Institute of Integral Studies, 2012, p. 1.

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I love this photo taken by my partner Michael during the talk I gave this week at the Lunch on Art talk entitled From Artist to A/r/ographer in the Department of Art at the University of Calgary. The photo beautifully reflects the overlapping and blurry qualities of the artist, researcher and teacher roles at work in the  a/r/tographer. I was invited to give this talk on arts practice-based methods at the same time I was reading the newly published book that highlights the writing of my mentor Dr. Rita Irwin, edited by Mindy Carter and Valeries Triggs - Arts Education and Curriculum Studies: The Contributions of Rita Irwin. Preparing for the talk and re-reading Rita’s work as well as my own and others writing on a/r/tography reminded me of how significant and timely this form of research is. In the past number of years I have not been writing directly on a/r/tography, yet it is always embedded and active in my work. To return to the educational home of my BFA and share the ideas and practices of a/r/tography to a new generation of artists and educators was a gift for me and I hope to those that attended. In this time of global uncertainty - politically and ecologically we need creative practices that consciously turn to a relational, critical and ethical way of coming to be, teach, know and unknow. 

If you want to watch the ppt and hear the talk learn a bit about a/r/tography and my journey with it here is the link.

From Artist to A/r/tographer

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Studio 12 in Glyde Hall became the site of the open studio installation of work I created while at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity Independent Artist Residency. Installed on 3 screens are moving image video collage works entitled (from front to back), Earth Ordinance, Fallen Tree Time, and a Meeting of Art. A triple labyrinth form on the floor leads the way into and out of the installation, offering an opportunity to pause in a center labyrinth that is separate from the 3 video entrances on the labyrinthine path. The last image is Cascade mountain peaking into the window. I loved that the mountain became part of the installation.

My focus at the residency was one of delving into the media I have been collecting since my sabbatical in 2015. Each video is located in one specific location (Carbondale, Il., Victoria, BC., & Berlin, Germany) and is based on a trance I entered as an awake dream process that is recorded, transcribed, transformed into involuntary poetic writing, re-recorded and laid down as the base narrative of the video, sound and still image collage of material collected at the site. I never know what the piece will be prior to beginning. The work evolves as I engage the editing process and is a co-inquiry process with the imagery and sound and poetic voice. Each video will have a personal essay that folds and unfolds alongside it. This work is part of a larger project of more than a dozen of these videos and essays. My focus for this winter and beyond is to delve into these pieces and theorize them within matrixial borderspaces, the anthropocene, new materialisms, ecocriticism, and arts-based and trance-based inquiry. 

The entrance to the studio has the on-going book Metramorphosis on the table which has been stitched into by others since 2011. A book that began as an embodied study book for matrixial theory that has taken on a life of its own. The book was a great gathering place for conversations during the open studio event. Thanks for all that engaged with it.

A special thank you to Holly Totten, the Digital Media Practicum Artist who patiently worked with me on my learning curve with FCP X.

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An artist residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity for 6 weeks was a restorative gift and a reunion for me. An emotional reunion with my full time art practice and living and working in Banff in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains where I had lived and work as a young woman almost 35 years ago. From my third floor corner studio, with its sentinel pine tree ever present, I could look out to three mountains and the Bow River. Although I was in residency with more than 30 other visual artists and met many musicians during this time I spent much time alone in my studio, riding my bike and on walks. Coming out mainly to eat and attend performances. I got to know numerous beautiful musicians and their passionate work - Yantra de Vilder, Aya Ueda and Julia Mortyakova and a diversity of visual artists. The second half of the residency I began to invite more artists into my studio and visited their studios. Two open studio events brought visitors and locals in to see the work being created and offered opportunity for many conversations about my video art collage project and trance-based practice from which my work is sourced. I was fortunate to have visits with curators organized by the program; Sean Lynch (Ireland), Jesse Birch (Nanaimo Art Gallery), Shawna Thompson (Esker Foundation) and Heidi Rabben (independent curator).

The Universities Art Association of Canada conference took place at the Banff Center while I was there, and my partner Michael and I co-presented on Matrixial Com-passion in a double panel that focused On Compassion in teaching art in the academy that was organized by Art Historian Dr. Susan Cahill from the University of Calgary. This was a highlight and was a rich and broad conversation on the need for compassion through art in teaching and learning spaces.

Artist residencies and conferences have been a source of significant nourishment for me as I travel this journey as an artist, researcher, writer and educator. They are co-events of intense immersion with myself, the particular environment, and others. An opportunity to look inward and focus but to also reach out and connect with others committed to a practice of life-long inquiry, creating and learning.

I’ll post next about the closing open studio and the studio installation of my work.

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Michael and I have the keys to Studio M* and have begun to move in! We posted the Studio M* manifesto on the door of Studio 6 as our first exhibit and signed it. Sharing a few shots of the space which is housed in the McHugh House Beltline Arts Hub, a heritage building. Just a few blocks south of downtown Calgary: when you come out the Center St. door you see the Calgary Tower. Can’t quite believe we are living back in Calgary and stepping right in so easily. We are looking forward to what will co-emerge from our matrixial artworkings and dreaming in this space and within this community. This is the first time in 10 years I am not starting my fall with teaching art at a university. This year is about making art. Michael and I, two ants making socially engaged art that dreams for the future.

I end with a quote from Carol Becker’s book “Thinking in Place.” She wrote;

“But there are people, even now, who are constantly reimagining not just the future but also their present, and the present and future of the collective. They are the creative minds to which one must turn in times like these, when the world is sent into turmoil and the failure of a coherent vision for our own society’s future is all too apparent. They are the green ants dreaming. They make the “art,” as Bauman writes, “that transforms the improbable into the inevitable.” And they create innovative structures that help humanity.” (p. 101).

The manifesto in text:

Studio M* Manifesto                   Exhibit #1.0 ( Aug-Sept. 2017)

- WE are a research creation lab intersecting Arts. Culture & Healing - WE are committed to an inclusive & expansive curatorial practice that stems from the Latin root curare - “to take care” - EVERYTHING is encountering others, human & more-than-human, a tableau of unique creative collaborations - WE commit to a Matrixial co-poetic paradigm of Artworkings in radical trust - We practice a co-relational Aesthetic as foundational and preceding the Ethical, while both ought to inform the shape of the Political - We live with the premise that EVERYTHING began without fear... imagine that! - SPONTANEITY is the life-blood-water of play, humour, sociality, sustainability, health & ecological sanity

Signatories: R. Michael Fisher Barbara Bickel

*M stands for “Matrixial” theory based on Bracha L. Ettinger’s art & philosophy. See, for example her book “The Matrixial Borderspace” published in 2005 by University of Minnesota Press.

Studio M* is a restorative and transformational learning, teaching & inquiry space for all. Co-conceived by artists-researchers-teachers Drs. Barbara Bickel & R. Michael Fisher.

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Driving through Saskatchewan and then into Alberta found me fighting with the wind for many hours as we drove our big truck towards our destination. An hour outside of Calgary I pulled the truck over at a small roadside rest area. I could not get out the drivers door as the wind was too strong. I crawled over the seats and got out the passenger side. Walking past the shelter of the truck I stood facing the warm 70 - 80 kmh wind gusts, my arms up, leaning into the winds embrace. It was exhilarating and shifted me into a state of complete reception. While I stood in the wind in my tree-like pose for a long time Michael entered the field on the side of the road and sat on a rock looking over the ocean-like waves of grass. We both stayed here for what felt like a long long time. Alone on this highway road side ingesting through our senses, the elements of the landscape we had left 19 years earlier.

Entering an overcast, cool and windy Calgary on July 18th, 2017 in the mid afternoon we drove the truck directly to the cliff overlooking the Elbow River, in the neighbourhood we had lived in for many years in the 1990s. A sacred place where we had marked many decisions with individual and shared rituals. The path to the cliff and its juniper bed was overgrown and we had to blaze a new trail through it. It took us off our normal path and before reaching the juniper bed Michael pointed to a large bush amidst the aspen trees, “saskatoon berries” he called out to me. “look at all of them and they are ripe.” Bushes we had never noticed before; even 2 years ago when we here while on sabbatical. Our landing ritual became a berry picking and eating ritual. The abundance of berries produced by these large bushes felt like a sign with perfect timing, ripe with the many possibilities the return to this city and country holds for us. We picked many berries that lasted us through our first week in Calgary. A week later we returned on our bikes to pick berries again on a very hot Sunday.

This wind and berry connection drew a full circle for me with Illinois, as on my  last visit with my colleague and friend, Sally Gradle in Champagne, Illinois a few weeks before we moved I picked berries in her back yard from her June berry trees. In Illinois what I know as prairie Saskatoon berries grow on trees and not bushes, and are called by a different name. I loved climbing high into the tree and picking and eating the berries as I stood tall on the ladder, my body swayed by the wind like a tree branch. Although the trunk is solid and does not move, when you are high up amidst the branches there is a fluid movement with its relationship with the wind. Wind and berries linking landscapes, experiences and people across thousands of miles. We may feel more at home in one place than another but each place holds resonances of interconnection through the wind, rain, sun, soil and plant life. For all of this and more I am grateful.

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Our journey in a 26 foot Uhaul through 4 US states on your journey north to Canada in pictures. Leaving Nashville, Illinois we went through a brief rain downpour before getting onto our first interstate highway to travel into Missouri, and a full rain bow appeared. We saw this as a sign that we were passing through a significant portal in leaving Illinois. We traveled as far as Hannibal, Missouri on our first day, the boyhood home of Mark Twain. The hotel reminded us of the car culture of American we were part of on this journey with its license plate “art” on the wall. In the morning we  headed to the cave that was the setting of Mark Twain’s story of Huckleberry Finn. The cave where the “bad” character, Injun Joe became trapped and died after the town sheriff closed off the cave entrance for the “safety” of the adventure seeking youth. It was cool and very beautiful inside the cave with its many passageways. A sacred sanctuary. We wanted to leave the tour and be by ourselves in the cave to make our own sounds with the energy of the ancient stones and minerals, leaving the jokes of the young tour guide behind. 

We then drove across the State of Missouri and headed north into Iowa. This freeway followed the Missouri River valley with miles and miles of bluffs on the sides. We managed to find routes around most major cities and traveled though many small towns. We crossed into the bottom tip of South Dakota and stayed the night at the Homestead Inn in Elk Point. In the morning we got up early and took our bikes out of the back of the truck and rode down the short bike path that took us from our Inn to the small town. We then found ourselves on Union 9 County Road with cornfields on either side proudly displaying the fertilizer brands on signs. Here we stopped and walked into the field with the GMO corn reaching our necks and sounded with the corn. We recorded the sounding and will be creating a sound piece from it. What struck us being so close to the corn was the almost total absence of any insects or any other plant life. It was rows upon rows of corn and dark soil. A mono culture ready to reach its peak.

Stopping at the local cafe, Ollies, after our bike ride we were served eggs and bacon while reading a brochure on Diversity Agronomy found pinned to the board above our table. Multiple pins holes on it marking the many readers of this counter hegemonic brochure in a county surrounded by GMO corn crops. We spoke briefly with the town’s sheriff and deputy who came in for breakfast and were curious about us and heard more about this southern point of S. Dakota surrounded by Iowa and Nebraska.

Later that afternoon, in contrast to our time in the cornfield and small town of Elk Point, our journey took us further up the Missouri river and into the Traverse Indian Reservation. The homelands of the Ogala Oyate Lakota (people). We stopped at a look out and sat with the tall grass natural prairie landscape with the diversity of plant life, loco weed, prairie cone flowers, purple bull thistles and mixed prairie grasses. We then took a side road into the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe reserve and although everything was closed for the day we were called by the beautiful architecture of the Sisseton Wahpeton College with its four drummers on the roof top of the assembly hall.

We spent our last night in the US in Fargo, North Dakota and as we got close to the city we traveled through a thunderstorm and downpour that ended in the most amazing double rainbows that lasted forever. We stopped at the side of the road and appreciated this second rainbow portal marking our journey back to Canada. The sunset that followed was stunning. Reminding us of the prairie sunsets that we had not experienced in a long time. The next morning we were very happy to leave Fargo and the road side hotel packed with baseball players and headed toward Portal, North Dakota that would allow us entry back into Canada. The last photo is us on a prairie field on the other side of the border in Saskatchewan. The dry prairie winds and sun warming and invigorating us for the last leg of our journey on Canadian soil to Calgary.

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My last days in Carbondale found me returning to and saying farewell to the four mother trees that nurtured me over the years living in the Shawnee Forest of Southern Illinois. My last visit with the trees brought friends; Megan, my Pacific Ocean sister in a double trunk tree pose and Holly, my Canadian tree sister in a mother tree hug. It was the trees and forest that I turned to in my times of struggle, grief and overwhelm during my nine years in the USA. Trees were my daily companions and my nourishment; like the Japanese I practice tree bathing.

The first art piece I did in my studio when I arrived in 2008 I entitled “Fallen Tree.” It was a visual metaphor of how I felt being uprooted from my home country of Canada and replanted in the foreign landscape and culture of Southern Illinois. What I did not know was that fallen trees are an essential part of the forest ecology. Fallen trees are called nursing logs as they nourish and feed new plant and tree growth in the forest. In my roles as teacher, advisor and director for students and my academic programs at Southern Illinois University, I myself became a nursing log. During my sabbatical in 2015, when I was temporarily released from my role as a nursing log, I experienced a fall where my feet slipped out from under me. Upon return to work, I began to seriously practice the yoga tree pose to address my chronic state of feeling unstable on my feet. The oak tree in front of my house, the cyprus tree on my regular walks around Campus Lake, and regular respite visits with the two cemetery trees, served as my steadfast teachers in regaining my leg strength and my spirit’s equilibrium.

In leaving Illinois and retiring from my academic positions I am aware that I no longer inhabit the fallen tree state as I begin a new life chapter in Calgary, the city I left 19 years ago to begin the academic chapter of my life. My limbs hold me upright and strong. I am infused by the many years of living within the forest, amidst a diversity of life experiences that have both challenged and enriched me.

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Releasing the dreams of the Diversity Dream Scroll with community at Mandala Gardens on the eve of July 6, 2017 was the last performative event of my time at SIU and in Southern Illinois. We gathered inside the center of the prodigious sandstone and grass labyrinth and shared an intention of releasing the dreams for diversity into the natural environment. Walking out of the labyrinth we invited the nurturing warmth of the gentle and softly lit evening to cleanse and extend the many dreams, visions, hopes and wishes contributed by numerous students, faculty, children, and friends since the fall of 2013. This performance ritual was the completion of a full circle (mandala) journey that began on the second day of my arrival in Carbondale (almost 9 years ago to the day), when I walked with my life partner, Michael, the concrete Labyrinth for Peace at the Gaia House Interfaith Center across the highway from my studio at the university. We did not know what my time at SIU would hold in store for me, but labyrinths, whether made of chalk, bricks, snow, or sandstone and grass were a grounding practice and anchoring creative ritual that I returned to again and again.

The processual walk ended with the dream walkers verbally sharing their own dreams for the future. Dreams for world peace, ecological harmony between humans and the natural world, political action, and political decisions based on the future well-being of all the worlds’ children, diversity awareness, and allyship between people that crosses all borders where voiced and given presence. This closing performance ritual powerfully countered the negative and ignorant fabricated F_X news coverage the Dream Scroll and Nap-Ins attracted during Women’s History Month this spring, and instead offered a generative healing space for fear-based actions to be transformed into love-based acts. 

Prior to this final performance ritual I told people I would probably never return to Southern Illinois. After the silent, reverent and joyful walk, the potluck feast, conversations, and farewell gift from Diana (a quartz stone, that has held a sacred place in the center of her original spiral mandala garden) I recognized my deep connection with this land and its people, and shifted my parting story to include a possible return to do further creative work on this land.

Thank you to Diana who has taken on the role of holder of the Diversity Dream Scroll while it is housed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies conference room in Faner rm. 3342 and to both Diana and Greg for hosting this final event. Gratitude to Margaret and Aster for carrying the Diversity Dream Scroll into the public space of the university through the March Nap-Ins. And as always great appreciation to Gregory Wendt for photographing the story of this experience and Cade Bursell for videoing, and to all those who were able to come and join this farewell ritual evening. It is my desire to keep alive connections with my American allies as we work to bring compassion, reverence, care and love to the forefront of peoples lives globally. May the dreams of all dream scrolls continue to work their way into and through our lives.

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Appalachia Artist Residency

Afterglow is the descriptor word that emerges as I reflect on the week Michael and I just spent as Visiting Artists at Appalachia State University in Boone, North Carolina where we inhabited the HOW Space downtown. This residency comes at the start of a juncture in our life where we are leaving my stable University position and stepping into a time of integration of the last 9 years of life experiences in the USA. Transitioning to a less stable and more fully co-creative life in Canada, this residency was transformative at multiple levels and a spiritual re-grounding for us as a creative couple. The following blogs will be mostly photos depicting moments of the residency; the Dream Scroll installation, the three Nap-ins that I facilitated with Education students, Montessori school children, and community members; the performative releasing of dreams; the labyrinth walking rituals in Katrina Plato’s grass labyrinth, a visit to Penland School of Crafts, artist talks, film screenings, and the Blue Ridge Parkway hikes and vistas that Michael and I sunk our beings into. We loved Appalachia and the people there who made our visit so rich; Art Educator Brooke Hofsess, Expressive Arts Therapist Katrina Plato in particular, and all the many students, faculty and people we met. I want to thank Shawna Caldwell for her documentation of the Nap-Ins. Such beautiful energy in these ancient mountains and in the people we met who call this place home. An extra thanks to Shawna for the new profile photo that I cropped from one of her photos.

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Hiking along the Blue-Ridge Parkway near Boone, North Carolina.

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Dark Moon MA Pose ritual in the prayer pose on the grass labyrinth at Katrina Plato’s home in Boone North Carolina with Brooke Hofsess, Katrina Plato, Shawna Caldwell and Jenny Carlisle. Wit(h)nessed by R. Michael Fisher and photo credits Shawna Caldwell. This practice is done at a distance with the members of the Gestare Art Collective.