Featured image: Poetry for Salal by Deanna Pindell
Deanna Pindell is an ecoartist whose work addresses the web of interrelationships in which art exists—the physical, biological, cultural, political, and historical aspects of ecosystems. Within this context Pindell’s art practice aims to fuse four themes—Ecology, Sanctuary, Metamorphosis and Remediation—into site-specific public art, gallery installations, and sculptures to create spaces that are meditative and thought-provoking.
Along with other artists operating in biological and ecological domains, Pindell’s work also explores novel modes of care for beings in multispecies worlds. Pindell’s guerrilla bioremediation strategy Thneeds Reseeds, was her recipe for reseeding clearcut forests with brightly colored wool balls. By repurposing the form and function of commodities, with the use of neglected woolen sweaters, these sculptures generated new kinds of flourishing by cultivating habitat for mosses and multiple species of vascular plants.
As a microbiopolitical intervention, Thneeds Reseeds offers an opportunity to think about the hopeful possibilities that emerge when one subverts dominant regimes for managing life. Rather than simply repeat failed truth-telling strategies or construct speech prosthetics for particular species, these sculptures are agential things in the world, tools for enlisting multiple species in the healing of damaged ecosystems.
In this sense, Pindell’s work can be seen as a proposal for living in blasted landscapes—a proposal intended not to say what is or what ought to be, but meant to destabilize dominant regimes of calculation and control, meant to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems, desires, and situations mobilizing us and our companion species.
See also: Multispecies Becomings and Ecoart
Further Reading
Kirksey, Eben et al. (2014) “Multispecies Becomings” in The Multispecies Salon, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 145-153.
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