Art for the Anthropocene -
SSHEAN + Tiina Kukkonen

Change with the Earth in Mind

In 2023, SSHEAN researchers (Heather McGregor and Sara Karn), artist and SSHEAN graduate student Micah Flavin, and artist-researcher-educator Tiina Kukkonen collaborated to develop an exhibit entitled Change with the Earth in Mind.

The results of our artification initiative were shown in October 2023 at the Studio Gallery of the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Together, we worked over the preceeding months to to envision how visual artworks and artmaking might contribute to climate change education research, pedagogy, and knowledge translation. Here we share glimpses of our research and art processes and outcomes.

This exhibition was made possible through funding provided by the Queen’s University Faculty of Education (Office of the Dean – Research and Strategic Initiatives and the Community Initiatives Fund) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

 

For the guiding ideas behind this project, see our research statement at the bottom of this page.

The art-making processes in this project were guided by three questions posed through conversation amongst SSHEAN researchers and Tiina:

How do you love the Earth and how does the Earth love you?

What makes you feel ready to change with the Earth in mind?

As you move into an uncertain future, what will you bring with you from the past?

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To engage teacher candidates in responding to the first question, Tiina taught workshops in Bachelor of Education classes at Queen’s, where participants were invited to create their own clay listening device, in order to better listen to the voice of the Earth. 

The clay cylinders were created using only natural materials, imprinted with pieces of nature, and not fired.  

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Final Mural

The second question was taken up through a collaborative public mural placed on “Student Street” of the Queen’s University Faculty of Education. A plain cotton sheet with fabric markers were provided alongside the prompt, What makes you feel ready to change with the Earth in mind.

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The mural was analyzed and embroidered according to the images and words that stood out as meaningful to the researchers.

Then, it was dyed using indigo (a natural dye).

Special thanks to artist Bethany Garner for her expertise and materials during the indigo dyeing process, and Soili Kukkonen for donating fabric and volunteering many hours to sewing the backing to the mural.

 

Tiina’s felted piece, Ignis Fatuus, set the context for the third question, posed as an interactive mixed-media element of the final exhibit. The future, in the face of climate change, is uncertain, but we can draw from our individual and collective pasts to find ways of navigating this uncertainty—as humans have always done. Thus, this section of the installation encouraged audiences to consider the knowledge, memories, relationships, ceremonies, and hopes that can help carry and guide us, as individuals and communities, into an uncertain future.

Tiina Kukkonen

Ignis Fatuus (2023)

Felted wool

“An ignis fatuus is a swamp light, a wisp of phosphorescent gas that misguides travelers at night. They think it is the light of a human habitation. They head toward it. All they find is more wilderness . . . There is the possibility of following an ignis fatuus for a little while without having an inflated sense of the promise it holds out of rescue. There are patterns that can sustain you, even though they do not last forever, even though they do not mark up the world as known once and for all—even though they are not, strictly speaking, true.”

Excerpt from: Ogden, E. (2022). On not knowing: How to love and other essays. University of Chicago Press.

Tiina Kukkonen

Swamp of Promise (2023)

Clay, Milk Paint, Wool felt

 

This swamp installation was created using the leftover clay from the listening device workshop. The clay pieces were then painted using an all-natural and environmentally friendly milk paint. The blue felt is made from natural wool fibres.

The words embroidered on the felt petals are hope, ceremony, memory, relationship, and knowledge.

The clay listening devices, created by 53 B.Ed. teacher candidates enrolled in the Summer 2023 Environmental Education course, were displayed along with the green sticky-note titles the artists left with their pieces. They were displayed on the ground so that attendees could touch and play with them, encouraging active and deep listening with, to, and for the Earth.

An eco-drone (soundscape), created by graduate student and artist Micah Flavin, accompanied the listening devices. Sounds such as wind, fire, birds, and voices speaking of hope and change, could be generated by attendees using the sampler.

In winter 2024 the clay listening devices were returned to the Earth in a display outside the Faculty of Education. As they are un-fired natural materials, we aim to observe as they respond to the elements. 

PROJECT RESEARCH STATEMENT (2023) 

 

Our research asks how to invite and support social studies and history teachers to contribute more to climate change and ecojustice education, and what benefits this could offer for learners. Studies on the prevalence of ecoanxiety demonstrate that doom-and-gloom, fact-heavy approaches to teaching climate change in any subject area are not meeting the needs of learners, including prospective teachers (Chawla, 2020). Beyond the science of ecosystem changes, this topic of study increasingly requires sitting with deeply disturbing implications such as complicity with environmental racism (Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022), the disproportionate effects of pollution and negative environmental impacts on racialized peoples. Attending to the emotions associated with learning about complex and intersecting crises is necessary to teach effectively, whether from a science, literacy, or historical perspective (Pihkala, 2020). 

 

 

This can be done by emphasizing solutions, actions, informed hopefulness, solidarity in community, and meaningful change–engaging examples of which can be found through history, civics, geography, and social studies inquiries. The arts are also well-positioned for this work, as they promote the types of imaginative, affective, and metaphorical ways of thinking and being that are needed to inspire transformation in the face of a highly uncertain future (Bentz, 2020).  

 

We have realized that further research into these questions necessitates tools and strategies to overcome objections to climate change study from prospective learners (including teachers), such as, but not limited to, attachment to familiar curriculum, subject area silos, barriers to outdoor learning, and activities perceived as political. 

 

 

Thus, we are motivated to identify openings, invitations, and pathways that serve to engage the audiences for our research and pedagogical offerings in a willingness to change. We suspect this willingness to change is characterized as much by tracing new directions in which to grow (a planting of sorts), as by tracing old directions which must be left behind to decay (a composting of sorts). We maintain that an individual willingness to change, as a precursor to learning more about climate and participating in urgent climate action, depends on a recognition of our interrelatedness with other species, and a meaningful, personal narrative about the place of one’s life in the connection between the past, present, and the future. That is, it depends on an evolving historical consciousness and sense of empathy.

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