Abstract
This article explores synergies between surrealism and posthumanism, including ways of knowing the world in ways that simultaneously value and decenter the human, and inspire much-needed creative thinking about reworlding the planet. These are playful ways of knowing that embrace chance, accept paradox, and question conventional understandings of time. Such ideas are explored through the example of an arts-based research project at a community farm in Lancashire, United Kingdom. The project’s “surrealist sensibility” resulted not only in encouraging participants’ creativity but also in opening them up to encounters with the more-than-human and providing acknowledgment of how connected we really are.
Keywords
Introduction
Arts-based research offers ways of engaging a “defiant imagination” to challenge the status quo (Foster, 2016). Its creativity and openness—as opposed to research that seeks definitive answers—means that there are possibilities for participants and researchers to attend to the nuances of lived experiences of the world, and for knowledge produced to “sit within a sense of mystery” (Fernandes, 2003, p. 99). This is particularly important in research that seeks to further social and ecological justice. Here, given the drastic issues of climate change and species extinction we are facing, there is a need for creative approaches to research that avoid replicating injustices; a need to tell a different story about the planet and our relationship to it (Kingsnorth & Hine, 2011). Posthumanism, as it intersects with creativity, expands traditional academic framings of arts-based research (Harris & Rousell, 2022). It not only acknowledges that we are deeply entangled with the natural world, but also recognizes that there is pleasure to be had in embracing this. As Haraway (2018) points out, “Generative, effective multispecies environmental justice must be as much about play, storytelling, and joy as about work, critique, and pain” (p. 102).
The cultural movement of surrealism, more than any other, provides a way of playfully seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, magic in the mundane, and making visible new and surprising connections (Foster, 2019). The surrealist movement has been involved with ecological concerns since its earliest days in the 1920s when it emerged in Paris from the radical absurdism of Dada. It was women surrealists—Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Ithell Colquhoun, Valentine Penrose, and Suzanne Césaire among others—who espoused environmental concerns alongside feminist ones. As such, they may be seen as the forerunners of deep ecology and ecofeminism (Rosemont, 1998). Their work called for a “redefinition of the relations between humankind and the animal, solidarity with endangered species, [and] a nonexploitative regard for the planet we live on” (Rosemont, 1998, p. li).
Here, there is resonance with posthumanism, particularly when it is understood as building on feminist theory, not least those new materialist approaches that stress the “embodied, embedded and sexed roots of subjectivity” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 48). These perspectives do not reject the humanist issues of social justice and equality, but rather understand them as more-than-human endeavors (Braidotti, 2013). Moral concern is extended to other species and even to rocks, rivers, and trees, drawing on new materialism’s belief that all matter is vital and affective (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010). Haraway (1988) describes how, in the vein of ecofeminism, and in a critical sense, “the world encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity” (p. 593). This is in opposition to the (“bourgeois” and “masculinist”) majority who view it as a resource to be mined. There can be no environmental justice or reworlding without multispecies environmental justice “and that means nurturing and inventing enduring multispecies—human and nonhuman—kindreds” (Haraway, 2018, p. 102).
Abram (in Abram and Hine, 2011) argues that it is the “more-than-human”—landforms, rocks, animals, and plants—that are “our real neighbours, the folks with whom we need to be
The farm’s deep ethical commitments to the human and more-than-human drew me and my colleague Barnaby King (who has since left academia to focus on performing arts) to volunteer at the community farm. As well as digging and planting, we carried out small-scale arts projects there, including a community performance and a photography exhibition. We thus had a vested interest in the farm, and also a shared commitment to artistic creativity and environmental and social activism. The yearlong arts-based research project that is discussed in this article took place over the course of the growing year. It incorporated workshops in Creative Writing, Photography, Mindful Movement, and Natural Sculpture, which were held, respectively, in the balmy spring, hot summer, early autumn, and beginnings of winter. The project culminated in a lantern-lit sculpture trail around the farm to celebrate the festival of Samhain, rooted in ancient Celtic paganism, at the end of the October.
The overall aim of the research was to explore how arts-based processes can foster new forms of communication and collaboration within and beyond the community farm. We were particularly interested in looking at how creative activities might enable people to explore (and perhaps even deepen) their experiences of being at the farm, whether as volunteers or visitors. These activities thus had the multiple purpose of producing knowledge about relationships between the human and more-than-human, of potentially nurturing these relationships, and of bringing more people to the farm who might become much needed members. Not only might this offer a wealth of benefits to the new volunteers (see Burke, 2022) but it would also help to ensure the farm could continue to make its contribution to the biodiversity of the local area and demonstrate its potential to contribute to an ecological reworlding (Haraway, 2018).
The article begins by sketching out some of the synergies between posthumanism and a “surrealist sensibility” (Foster, 2019). Definitions are deliberately kept loose: the “keyword” of posthuman scholarship is multiplicity (Braidotti, 2019), and surrealism certainly does not require locking up in the “dungeons of narrow definition” (Rosemont 1998, p. xxxii). Surrealist artist Toyen describes the movement as “a community of ethical views” (cited in Rosemont, 1998, p. 81), which seems appropriate here, particularly if the notion of community is extended to the more-than-human, hybrid creatures, the soil, and the air. The article moves on to discuss the research methodology employed at the community farm and the importance of keeping it “open, alive, loose” (Lather, 2010, p. x). That way there is space for those chance encounters much beloved by surrealists. These abounded at the community farm and some are detailed in the following three findings sections, which explore creativity, wonderment, distortions of time, and our more-than-human participants.
Questioning the Primacy of the Human
As Coole and Frost (2010) argue in their Introduction to
A different perspective—and one that dissolves the human/nonhuman divide and other problematic dualisms—is certainly necessary when it comes to tackling environmental crises and encouraging a more just society (Fox & Alldred, 2020). Environmental justices are always entangled with social injustice, as well as contextual, historical, and cultural matters and matterings (Koro et al., 2022). As Moore (2016) argues, the nature/society dualism is as “directly implicated in the modern world’s colossal violence, inequity, and oppression” as the binaries of Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism (p. 2). This is violence against the human as well as nonhuman. Briggs (2015) laments how even environmental movements maintain this false divide between people and the planet. Our preoccupation with sustainability and renewable resources has only shifted our role from dominating nature to managing it (Briggs, 2015). A change in thinking is required if we are to develop a less destructive, more harmonious relationship with the Earth and this involves becoming open to the life force and spirit of those things we have considered to be inanimate (Briggs, 2015).
The concept of the Anthropocene, while useful to some extent, shows Nature/Society dualism “at its highest stage of development” (Moore, 2016, p. 3). Its seemingly rational, yet market- and profit-focused, “business-as-usual,” stance has the unfortunate effect of sapping our capacity “for imagining and caring for other worlds” (Haraway, 2016a, p. 53). Haraway (2016b), who prefers the term
An understanding of a “living present” (Abram, 1997, p. 201) is nothing new to indigenous cultures who have not fallen completely “into the civilized oblivion of linear time” (Abram, 1997, p. 202). It is also important to acknowledge the complex epistemic traditions of indigenous peoples “wherein animals, plants, and spirits are understood as beings who participate in the everyday practices that bring worlds into being” (Sundberg, 2014, p. 35). These knowledge systems, unlike those in the majority world, have not been organized in terms of dualist ontologies. Indigenous research thrives on story, and Smith (2012) outlines the harm wrought on indigenous communities as stories have been dismissed and knowledge colonized. Indigenous stories enable the handing down of tribal values based on ancient knowledges (Kovach, 2009) and tend to encourage holism, a mutual balance, and harmony among animals, people, elements, and the Spirit world (Archibald, 2008). Similarly, a posthuman approach acknowledges the “world’s dynamic self-articulation, or narrativity” (Oppermann, 2016, p. 30). This radical perspective, says Oppermann, is “one that cannot be dismissed as the stuff of dreams” although it “strangely alters the tenor of our reflections and the tonality of our dreams” (Abraham, 2010, p. 141, cited in Oppermann 2016, p. 30).
For surrealists, dreams are the stuff of life, and they aimed to dissolve the dualism of waking life and the dreamworld. André Breton—a leader of surrealism—insisted on “the resolution” of dreams and reality “into an absolute reality, a
In its attempt to avoid and renegotiate dualisms, posthumanism owes a debt to surrealism: “the dream world can offer a unique space of visualization; the possibilities opened by the future are already embedded in the mystery of the present; the conscious becomes the unconscious” (Ferrando, 2016, p. 4). Surrealism also opened the possibility for understanding that “qualities long thought exclusive to human beings thrive and exist in other beings and other things” (Conley, 2013). Well known for disorienting and subverting the everyday through objects, surrealists often saw objects, matter, as having power and agency (Sowels, 2022). Liberating them from their established uses stimulated imagination and desire (Sowels, 2022). Meret Oppenheim’s
Oppenheim also engages with the female surrealist treatment of nature as a source of creativity (Brough-Evans, 2016). In so doing, several surrealists played with the notion of hybrid creatures, comprising plants, humans, and animals. One such artist is Leonor Fini, whose “posthuman sensibility drove her work and her life” (Ferrando, 2016, p. 5): I experience an erotic world where there is no divergence, no hostility, where everything mixes together (. . .) I like to feel myself in a state of metamorphosis like certain animals and certain plants. (Leonor Fini, cited in Ferrando, 2016, p. 105)
Lancashire-born Leonora Carrington is well known for her fabulous hybrid creatures in her paintings and fiction, which “take for granted the transience of any distinctions among states of life, death, time, embodiment” (Lyon, 2017, p. 163): A human animal may fade into a painting, or take flight, or mate with a boar; a bee swarm can become a goddess; vegetables collude; decay is self-animating; deep time enters the present. (Lyon, 2017, p. 163)
In her world of the imaginary and those “perverse and comic fairy tales,” she conjures through paint and words, “the conventional hierarchy of values is turned upside down in a spirit of rebellion” (Warner, 1995, p. 382). Carrington spent much of her later life in Mexico where her work—which had always employed a plethora of mystical and occult symbolism (Aberth, 2010)—became imbued with Mexican indigenous views of reality, including nahualism, which understands “a fully determined, intimate relationship” between human, animal, or vegetable (Brough-Evans, 2016, p. 107). Carrington, with “ecofeminist vision” (Arcq, 2022, p. 95), thus questions the “primacy of the human species among life forms on the planet” (Aberth, 2010, p. 8). This is work which, according to Lyon (2017), actually makes posthumanist thinking possible rather than the other way round. If we accept it on its own terms, with its emphasis on materiality and relations that exist outside of a humanist narrative, “we will find therein a composite multiverse that contemporary posthumanist theory is struggling to encompass” (Lyon, 2017, p. 168).
Knowing Differently
When taking a posthumanist perspective, which stresses the interconnections and entanglements with our environments, “methodological thinking should respond in kind by fostering similar interconnections” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 834). Ulmer (2017) argues that if we decenter humans as the only life form capable of knowing, “then a wealth of research possibilities emerge” (p. 834). Employing arts in the process of knowledge production can help to make visible “threads of interconnectedness” (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022, p. 39). Such an approach can keep research encounters “alive” as well as challenge the status quo by encouraging participants and audiences to see the world from different perspectives (Foster, 2016).
In collaboration with local artists, we designed a series of 16 workshops in four blocks; each block consisted of four workshops that were roughly aligned with the four seasons. This seasonal design, inspired by our involvement in the growing year at the farm, afforded an aesthetically pleasing structure to the project. In carrying out the work, however, we began to understand that the elements had a real part to play in the knowledge produced. The first of the workshop series, Creative Writing, took place during a balmy spring in the earthy-smelling warmth of a polytunnel, where we jostled for space with trays of sprouting seeds. We shared the design and delivery of sessions with a local published author who had a keen interest in the Lancashire landscape and growing food.
We played a series of surrealist games in Creative Writing as a way of encouraging collaboration and overcoming some of the anxieties surrounding the writing process that participants expressed. I opened this session with a short talk about surrealism and showed the group images produced by some of the aforementioned surrealist women artists. Play is one of surrealism’s key identifying factors, in particular playing collective games (Cox, 2014). These “exercises of the imagination” offered surrealists a way of freeing “words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminacy for premeditation and deliberation” (Gooding, 1991, p. 10). The ultimate aim was “collectively achieved revelation” (Gooding, 1991, p. 11).
We began with the most well-known game, the exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis). The name comes from a line of poetry created through the technique:
For the second block of workshops, held during the very hot summer, a series of Mindful Movement workshops were led by one of the farm’s volunteers, a dancer and movement therapist. She developed a range of loosely structured exercises (or what might perhaps be better described as games or challenges) that involved roaming a particular space, gathering of sensory experience, and an invitation to play in different ways with the found environment. This was shaped by the intense heat and having to regularly seek shelter under a hastily constructed canvas canopy.
The third workshop series took place in early autumn, with the farm’s manager—formerly a professional photographer—leading four photography workshops. These saw participants taking shelter in the barn to protect their cameras from the rain. As autumn began to turn to winter, we completed the project with our final series of Natural Sculpture workshops, led by artists from the renowned outdoor arts company,
Participants included current volunteers at the farm and a number of local people who happened across the project through information posted on social media. We were also joined by university students on occasion. People came from a variety of backgrounds and ranged in age from late teens to mid-80s. There was an almost equal mix of men and women. Some participants just took part in the genre of workshop that most interested them; others tried out more than one, and a couple of participants took part in all four. Numbers at the groups fluctuated. Attendance was highest at the natural sculpture workshops where we regularly had more than 20 people turn up. Mindful Movement’s attendance was impacted by the summer holidays and some weeks had around 20 participants, whereas others just a handful. Photography and Creative Writing each had a core group of around eight attendees.
Creative Writing, Photography, and Natural Sculpture produced data in the form of poems, images, and objects/installations. We supplemented these with informal, audio-recorded conversations with participants, which took place both during and after the workshops. Mindful Movement did not produce any tangible outputs, so we relied more heavily on these conversations as a way of attempting to capture insights and understandings. This was far from ideal, given that the bodily experience of this work was difficult—if impossible—to translate into spoken language. However, this tension in itself was an interesting one. Ulmer (2017) suggests that representation is perhaps something “that might be troubled in degrees” and “less-representational” research might prove to be an intermediate goal (p. 839). The importance of posthumanism, she points out “may not be in knowing, but in exploring how we are entangled with other organisms around us” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 839). The following sections begin to explore these entanglements through the stories that emerged during the project, and do so with a surrealist spirit.
The Young Pantechnicon Spits the Shining Jay
One of the more-than-human life forms that played an integral role in the project was the willow that grows abundantly in thickets and groves on the farm’s marshy land. It is deceptively strong and pliable, and very beautiful both visually and in the soothing sounds it produces as the breeze catches it. Willow appeared in participants’ writing and photographs, and allowed itself to be woven into new forms in the Natural Sculpture workshops. It was perhaps some of the Mindful Movement exercises, however, that really transformed people’s relationship with the plant.
In one exercise, participants were given instructions to walk slowly up to a dense thicket of willow. They naturally came to a halt as they reached the seemingly impenetrable mass of stems. But then they were told to walk
“It felt weird cos the lines went one way . . . and we went the other way . . . and it felt like we shouldn’t, but nice. I felt like a naughty kid going the wrong way” (research participant). A man in the group laughed in response as he added, “I’ve had lots of practice at going through hedgerows where we shouldn’t go through.” The experience of breaking rules and transgressing boundaries is not only surrealist in spirit but also reflects the nature/culture divide. A sense of prohibition perhaps comes on one hand from our perceptions of the dangers of the natural world, and on the other from a simultaneous imposition of human limits and boundaries (that place is “out of bounds,” perhaps because it is dangerous but more likely because it is private property).
For other participants, though, the boundary was imposed by the willow itself, and crossing this facilitated her “getting to know it” on an intimate level: I didn’t expect to enter their territory. They were so strong and formed. They had made their own boundaries but still I was entering in between them . . . . And when we’re turning back, I get time to sense the texture of the stem. And it was so different—the variation in the same patch over there—it was so beautifully created and I never noticed while going the first time. So, when coming back I was more open to the minute differences and changes that there were.
Acknowledgment of—and emphasis on—this world of the willow sees the human world fade into the background. Braidotti (2019) argues that displacing the centrality of the Anthropos “exposes and explodes a number of boundaries” whereby the cosmos as a whole becomes an object of critical enquiry (p. 10). However, it remains difficult to include nonhuman voices in research. As Ferrando (2012) notes, “non-human standpoints are arduous to be engaged in, outside of an empathic approach by humans reflecting in an ‘as if’ mode” (p. 12). This may be overcome in future, says Ferrando (2012), through the development of biological artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, recent research using hi-tech recordings analyzed by AI algorithms has revealed that plants emit sounds when under stress (Khait et al., 2023).
Our project, though, relied on anthropomorphism to sense more-than-human perspectives. For instance, in Mindful Movement, one participant described the way that he empathized with a tree as he sheltered from the hot midday sun that was causing much of the vegetation to shrivel and curl: I had a wacky thought. There’s a tree over there—I stood in the shade of the tree and I listened to the leaves and the leaves were going, “pat, pat, patter,” which sounded exactly like rain on the leaves. Are they sending a message out that they want some rain? Sending a message to the universe—“Send rain.”
There is a paradox in the way that posthumanism “refuses the ontological primacy of human experience” while emphasizing its own humancentrism, “given that it remains theorized by and for human beings” (Ferrando, 2012, p. 10). Fox and Alldred (2020) refer to this as one of the “unusual capacities that must not be ignored or sidelined” in posthuman research (p. 126). These unusual capacities also include the ability to behave altruistically to unknown others and to imagine the future: these unusual capacities are now—perhaps ironically—essential to address anthropogenic environmental challenges. They should not be denied or rejected simply to assert an ecological purism that sees “humanity” as the problem but need to be part of a vital materialist mix, along with the material capacities of non-human elements of the environment. (Fox & Alldred, 2020, p. 126)
Another of the Mindful Movement exercises involved participants wading slowly through a large area of tall grass, stopping where they felt the impulse to stop and experiencing being there: “There was a bit of a sense of like a dance or a giant game of chess or something. I move over here and oh, somebody else moves over there” (research participant). Suddenly, interrupting this quiet and deliberate practice, a startled hare tore through the field. A collective gasp from the group was followed by a gale of laughter as we were woken from our collective reverie. In Celtic mythology and folklore, the hare is seen as a creature with supernatural powers and links to the mysterious Otherworld, shape-shifter, and trickster (Kneale, 2017). Tricksters value and exploit that which appears random and coincidental in the universe (Hyde, 2008) and our encounter with this symbolic creature proved a timely reminder not to take ourselves and our contemplations too seriously. Haraway (1991) describes how nature itself might be seen, not as a resource for humankind, but as “witty agent” or “coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse” (p. 199).
We saw this language on numerous occasions during the Mindful Movement: not only in the fleeting interaction with the hare but also with the willow, with horseflies and other bugs, the fierce sun, and with the very ground itself, constantly threatening to trip us up (what could be more trickster-like?). Understanding the world that we encounter in research as an active entity is important despite introducing “unsettling possibilities,” including “a sense of the world’s independent sense of humour” (Haraway, 1991, p. 199). The surrealist spirit of the project meant we were open to those productive possibilities of luck and chance, which are also in the trickster toolkit.
An Articulate Cabbage Butterfly Running the Blue Cathedral
On the evening of the sculpture trail that ended our project at Burscough Community Farm, that unassuming and unremarkable (at first glance) place was transformed into a glittering otherworld strung with myriad tiny lights. Families that came to the public event were enchanted as they were handed willow-fashioned lanterns and led round the twenty or so sculptures and installations. Yet the whole project seemed to enchant its participants who made frequent references throughout the project to the “magic” of the farm and how it sparked their creativity. The Creative Writing workshops, one participant insisted, could not have happened anywhere but in that warm polytunnel, full of burgeoning life. The sculptures and installations that emerged from the Natural Sculpture sessions were declared by so many as “meant to be,” thanks to the wisdom of the pumpkins.
For some women surrealists, it was occultism that provided the foundation for the use of automatic writing techniques as divination and a way of giving art a magic power (Hale, 2020). For Oppenheim, such psychic automatism was a key methodological principle to an ecological praxis (Rosemont, 1998). She believed that works produced in this way “will always remain alive and will always be revolutionary . . . because they are in organic liaison with Nature” (cited in Rosemont, 1998, p. 52). This is also a creativity that might be understood in posthuman terms; a creativity that does not prioritize human “culture” over “nature” or see them as separate (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022). A posthuman creativity is the transversal force that “cuts across and interconnects all living matter” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 66) and recognizes that “we are, all of us, creative collaborations with and of the specificity of our histories and environments” (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022, p. 524).
One of the natural sculptures, “Hope the Fairy,” grew out of—and towered over—a willow grove. Like a
A growing awareness of other life forms on the farm was a theme that ran through all of the workshops. A participant in Photography took a series of images of a shallow pool of water that had collected on a piece of ground cover material. He described his experience as follows: Well, the thing about that area is it’s not an obvious area cos it’s just covered in polythene and it’s wet. But when you actually go on to the area it’s its own ecosystem. The puddles have attracted dirt; the dirt has attracted animals, little critters, and the whole thing is absolutely vibrant in there now.
He had been arrested by this other worldly activity that had gathered, and spoke of how he did not want to leave it. His photographs were produced through a collaboration with this ecology and the technology of his phone camera. As Harris (2021) points out, “the notion of ‘creative agency’ and ‘creative ecologies’ are inextricably connected” (p. 21. Cited in Harris & Holman Jones, 2022, p. 523).
A participant in the Mindful Movement (whose first language is Kannada) was similarly mesmerized by what might be considered mundane, this time the shadows that danced on the long grass at the farm: The grass, sometimes it was still, but the shapes in it: it was not the grass moving but it was the . . . shade moving on this. So it was creating an illusion . . . . There is one famous quote in my language: [speaks Kannada then translates] “So where is the reality there?” So yeah. I felt the grass was moving—from the distance, it was the grass that was movement, but when I went closer, it was the shade.
During one of the Creative Writing workshops, a woman in her 80s wrote the following rhyming couplet: Hiding duck, Are you on eggs? How are you struck by my wondering legs?
This led to a discussion in the group about the deliberate and playful ambiguity of wondering and wandering (when spoken), and discussed how one might “wonder” with one’s legs or “wander” with one’s mind. In Mindful Movement, the act of “wondering,” as a conscious process of inquiry, was often physical and embodied as much as cerebral. Legs certainly “wondered” every bit as much as minds, as participants followed instructions to lift their heels off the ground one at a time and feel the movement in the small of their backs with their hands, as they slowly walked around noting how the thick, springy tufts of grass under their feet dictated their movements. An embodied knowing was recognized by surrealists: “The matter of our bodies,” Carrington said, “like everything we call matter, should be thought of as thinking substance” (cited in Warner, 2016, p. 23). In a posthumanism committed to feminist and critical theory, embodiment is important because it attends to ways different bodies are subject to forces of oppression, and it also recognizes how material knowledge “move across in/non/human bodies” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 837).
The verb “to wonder” communicates both “the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire” (Warner, 1995, p. xvi). The marvelous is both medieval notion and Surrealist technique “which locates a sense of the magical in the quotidian” (McAra, 2023, p. 2). Along with the uncanny, it is one of the most “important categories of Surrealist experience and perception” (Gremels & Strom, 2022, p. 28). One does not necessarily need to produce objects, images, or texts in any form to be Surrealist, but rather to be inspired or provoked to see that the marvelous and uncanny are “the phenomena of everyday life” (Gremels & Strom, 2022, p. 28). This attitude is one that might help us to move beyond the “mess” that we have created through objectifying the natural world and seeing it as a resource (Abram in Abram & Hine, 2011): To feel this breathing biosphere as something other than an object is to begin to sense that there’s something inexhaustibly strange about this world, something uncanny and unfathomable even and especially in its everyday humdrum ordinariness. The way any weed or clump of dirt seems to exceed all of our measurements and our certainties. And it’s this resplendence of enigma and otherness, this uncanniness, that we eclipse whenever we speak solely in terms of scarcity and shortage. (p. 64)
One participant, who had taken part in both Creative Writing and Natural Sculpture, had been inspired by the Creative Writing session on surrealism, and Carrington’s work in particular, reporting that something had “unlocked” within her. Her pumpkin led her to a spot near another one of the willow glades where she collaborated with the web of plant life to create a beguiling installation. An archway formed from harvested willow was veiled with transparent curtains, decorated with freshly fallen autumn leaves. The path was lined with tiny elemental beings that the participant had remembered from a Carrington image and had fashioned from found materials. Large glass bowls were placed in front of the curtain, filled with foraged fruits of the harvest.
At the Samhain sculpture trail, visitors were invited to help themselves to a carnivalesque mask decorated with more gathered foliage. The “dead” matter of the leaves breathed life into the foliate masks that transformed those wearing them into mythical beings harmonious with their surroundings. These beings were then to push through the curtains and symbolically walk from Autumn into Winter. Or perhaps it was more than symbolic; the participant who created the installation insisted that it really did get cooler on the other side. Sinquefield-Kangas et al. (2022) see engagement in the arts as leading to this wondrous ability not only of displacing perceptions of time but also blurring the boundaries between ourselves and that which is other. Thus, it is possible to cultivate empathy through “ecological imaginings” (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022, p. 40). Past, present, and future are “co-constitutive in shaping our realities”; realities where human and more than human are on an equal, participatory level (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022, p. 41).
The project meant a great deal to the participant, and she frequently expressed how it released her from the weight of her caring responsibilities, which she felt had stymied her life. She was compelled to create the installation and, in a recorded conversation a couple of weeks after the event, laughed, “I’ve never put so much energy into something so pointless!” She continued, Playing—that was what it was. It was like when you were a teenager and you don’t have to think about making sure there’s enough food in for tea, or any of that sort of thing, just doing that. And that’s what I’d be like if I had no responsibilities.
The Mindful Movement workshops were also characterized by a sense of lack of
This raises the question of the purpose of creativity. In their manifesto for posthuman creativity, Harris and Holman Jones (2022) reject any definition based on use value. Citing Glaveneanu et al. (2020), they note that “creative outcomes are not only new and appropriate for a certain task; they can give meaning and even joy to our existence.” (p. 524)
The combination of the playful, creative exercises and the apparent “purposelessness” of the work also led to a distortion of time, which is emblematic of both surrealism and posthumanism. In our series of audio-recorded conversations over the course of the four Mindful Movement workshops, there are multiple mentions of time: the difficulty of keeping track of time and surprise at how quickly time has passed. Like Dali’s famous image,
After one Mindful Movement exercise, an older man in the group told us, I regressed about 60 years. I could have happily stayed there for another half an hour. Until my mum calls me in for supper.
With surrealist spirit, memory and imagination take precedence over logic and “reality.” From a posthumanist stance, “approaching time as a multifaceted and multi-directional effect enables us to grasp
Conclusion
This chance pairing, generated through the question-and-answer game played in a Creative Writing workshop, encapsulates the fear generated by the climate crisis—predictions of a time when the sun fails to rise—as well as a possible solution. Perhaps we might avoid—or at least not dwell on—a catastrophic end, through posthuman creativity and engaging the imagination to conjure up more positive worlds. If, as Rebecca Solnit (2014) believes, “the destruction of the earth is due in part. . . to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters,” then this is essential, and never timelier, given mounting ecological crises.
Surrealism offers an engaging way to develop these faculties and to see beyond hegemonic norms, including that prevailing notion that the natural world and the human world are somehow separate. Human and more-than-human matter(s) might be viewed as devoid of hierarchical scale, on “
At the time of writing, the community farm continues to flourish. On my most recent visit, bunches of straw flowers hung from the ceiling in the barn, drying in readiness for the upcoming wreath-making sessions. There are also spoon-carving workshops on offer. These crafts are a legacy of our research project, and both involve the willow; it forms the structure of the wreaths and is readily whittled into utensils. Despite being regularly harvested, it is growing prolifically and has taken over even more of the farm. Through the creative activities, it continues to draw people to the site where they are able to experience its magic.
A willingness “to live in the realm of mythology, metaphor, and mystery” is a radical move (Rankin, 2015, p. 78), and it is the arts that might enable the understanding that everything is connected, from people to animals, plants, water, the oceans, and the mountains. Whereas this is nothing unusual in Indigenous cultures, in the Western world we have “come to believe that we are connected to nothing” (Rankin, 2015, p. 78). Regaining this insight offers much-needed hope.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was funded through Edge Hill University’s Research Investment Fund.
