SGCI 2018 VEGAS
 

GOING TO GROUND

Organizers: Alison Judd and Anna Gaby-Trotz

 

Participants:

Mark Bovey, Elizabeth D-Agostino, Agata Derda, Lise Drost, Amanda Forrest-Chan, Arron Foster, Anna Gaby-Trotz, Jill Ho-You, Tiffany Hokanson, James Hunter, Heather Huston, Liz Ingram, Alison Judd, Colin Lyons, Nicholas Satinover, Kelsey Stephenson


ABSTRACT

This is where we will begin, with an excerpt from a short story by Jan Zwicky, a Canadian poet/philosopher called Black Spruce. In it she describes returning to her childhood home – a farm on the Saskatchewan prairies. One evening after dinner, she walks out on the land – to revisit a beloved stand of Black Spruce on the river. As she nears her destination and comes round a bend in the river she sees that, “The whole hillside has slumped and been absorbed into the river, leaving a cutback, pale and raw … A dissolution that complete, taken by water in a year without rain. The cold weight in the pit of my stomach — something awry where I thought I was least vulnerable, in the place that was stable when other things weren’t, that was solace because unchanging, or changing cyclically, slowly, on a rhythm large enough to serve as a backdrop against which other losses might be made sense of, and I am stumbling up through the cutwood, bursting out the northeast corner into the winter-white hayfield, under those dry swollen clouds, in my home place, lost”.

 

We are taken by this idea that the land is something that we use to mark other losses against and through a visceral approach to observing, studying and documenting specific locations we can be witness to change; sometimes rapid and catastrophic, sometimes slow and incremental.


We propose that the work then, will be about time, and change, and how these elements play out and unfold across different scales – as we attempt to make sense of change, to sort out ways of knowing and understanding – and to ground ourselves.