Attending to Place: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Hurt Places with Trebbe Johnson
Attending to Place: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Hurt Places with Trebbe Johnson
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, March 8th, 7 pm ET
How do we face the ecological devastation and human desecration of beloved places? For many of us, there is a temptation to let the world's crises shape the direction of our creative lives and our activism. Trebbe Johnson, artist and author of Radical Joy for Hard Times, invites us to imagine new ways to attend to these losses by considering what constitutes “worthwhile action.” For Trebbe, learning to engage artfully with wounded, broken, and hurt places is a radical, courageous, and necessary act. Join us as Trebbe shares what it means to “gaze even here” and how this nurtures meaningful and inclusive ways to express sorrow while cultivating radical joy and beauty amid the ruin.
In partnership with Trebbe Johnson and the Radical Joy for Hard Times project, the Kinship Photography Collective will launch a call for engagement. Please join us and share thoughts and ideas from your own practice and help us craft the core questions for our next collective call.
In preparation for this conversation, we highly recommend reading Trebbe’s essay The Coal Remembers, featured in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, 5-Volume Set.
Trebbe Johnson began thinking about bringing attention and beauty to wounded places in 1987, when she interviewed Oneida engineer David Powless and he told her of his belief that the steel waste he had received a National Science Foundation Grant to recycle was but “an orphan from the circle of life.” Before founding Radical Joy for Hard Times she pursued this path by guiding a week-long retreat in a clear-cut old-growth forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia; offering a ceremony at Ground Zero, New York two months after the September 11 attacks; and leading a workshop in a burned forest. Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and three books on finding and making beauty in hurt places: Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places, 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty, and You Have Made the Earth More Beautiful! She has written many articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
This Kinship talks is co-sponsored by:
Alli Harper, Erosion at Merricks Creek Estuary
Alli Harper, Erosion at Merricks Creek Estuary
Julie Williams Dixon, The Edge is Moving
Julie Williams Dixon, The Edge is Moving
