VISIONARY INSTITUTE
Bioactive Wayfaring Organ- 2025
Old Shadows, at Ninebanks Hearse House and Keenley Chapel. Art exhibit to focus on Northumberland's land and heritage curated by Melinda McGarry and Paulina Michnowska
The rules of the land are the rulers of ideas. This organ of wayfaring learns as it moves, adapts as it touches, remembers as it walks. It resonates with the metabolic and transformative wanderings of the land. The work invokes an improvised continuity of care, a choreography of hands and plants entangled in speculative survival and healing.
Gloves on rowan sticks; drawings of hands made of lines of necklaces of rowan berries — each bead a fruit, a seed, a focus, a pulse of touch, a trace of magic. Walking hands carry whispers of forest gardens: a circle of rowan, a triangle of balm, a square of mugwort. Hands walk with lines, secreting secrets to be kept alive, they model and map. The touch of the land activates growth and resonance — a bio-abundance of constant change and poetic entanglements.
Time spirals through hand-gestures, tactile and poetic — a prayer of the unsayable.
Developed under the auspices of the Multispecies Visionary Institute, the work situates itself within “land practice”: an expanded, research-driven approach to art-making that unfolds with the seasons and bioavailability. This methodology explores how art can act as a cultural and critical practice of connection, cultivation, and care, reimagining alternative futures in a world facing environmental crisis.
Developed under the auspices of the Multispecies Visionary Institute, the work situates itself within “land practice”: an expanded, research-driven approach to art-making that unfolds with the seasons and bioavailability. This methodology explores how art can act as a cultural and critical practice of connection, cultivation, and care, reimagining alternative futures in a world facing environmental crisis.