Generative conversations can be life-changing. When they happen, reflexivity gives birth to possibility. Words and ascribed meanings swirl to bring light upon what has been, what is, what might become — indeed — what will become through ours and others’ agency. It is the agency of Earth Canvas that I will focus on in this short reflection on Landcare.
I first became aware of Earth Canvas when, in November 2019, I participated in one of their field days in Southern New South Wales at the property of regenerative farmers Joy & Bill Wearne. It occurred under the shade of a red-box tree with an audience for all to see.
Here I encountered Rosalind Atkins, the natural world artist in conversation with the Wearne’s and others exploring both large and small environmental contexts, practical farming know-how, philosophy, and regenerative agricultural practice. It was ‘doing in action’ in a creative way. The artist sharing her private and public world of sense-making, creating the conditions for a meandering conversation involving farmers as well as local and broader peoples.
Very gently and implicitly, the conversation unfolding in ways that revealed perhaps a collective view that we all have some responsibility for this land we inhabit. Landcare. And in this conversation, as many acquaintances and strangers conversed, all struggled to find the words for a shared language to encompass everyone’s separate but inter-connected knowledge worlds. And then something unusual happened as can only happen in generative conversations. Both artists and farmers began to extoll the virtues of an expanded type of literacy. A literacy required to 'read the land’ in more perceptive ways. The artists’ impression of the subtleties, beauties, energies, and weirdness of nature. The regenerative farmers’ knowledge of farming systems, hydrological ebbs and flows, topography, soil carbon, and fertility, enhancing biodiversity, seasonal variabilities — of simply making a quid. And at the centre of it — the land and our relationship to it. An expression of caring for land that contributes to the objectives of Australia's National Landcare program.
Only the foolish would think that what emerged on this field day was new. But there was an air of renewal about it. Renewal grounded in the shared space of quietly imbibing, listening, re-awaking to ‘other’. Each person accessing some insight into their own unique understanding of the unfamiliar. Profoundly personal and yet a place inside where sustainable political will is born.
Imagine the reflexivity and possibility of this literacy emerging as encoded expressions of curated art?! Art curated to spawn ongoing generative conversations in local art galleries, in school curricula activities, in board meetings, in political circles, and beyond. Generative stories about art and regenerative agriculture with life-changing potential. Generating real-world agency in sustainable ways. Bringing life to Australia’s Landcare program in the subtlest but hugely empowering ways.
And, now some 18 months later this is exactly what Earth Canvas is continuously catalysing. Six artists have now collaborated with different regenerative farmers across New South Wales and Victoria to produce a collection comprised of fifty pieces of art. This Earth Canvas Exhibition is now touring Eastern Australia with exhibitions either having been held or are yet to be held in Albury, Swan Hill, Mt Gambier, Mildura, Wagga Wagga, Tamworth, Griffith, and Canberra. Earth Canvass is engaging with the Australian Capital Territory Natural Resource Management (ACT NRM), one of the spokes of Australia’s National Landcare Program, to organise a large-scale event to coincide with the opening of the exhibition in Canberra in August 2022.
Regional Australia is doing it again — punching above its weight — both intellectually and practically. This time contributing to possibilities for the incremental healing of our land and our environment, whilst at the same reminding us of the gratitude we all have for our food, for the sharing of food with each other — indeed for our gradual connectivity with and appreciation of those that have been here so sustainably and wisely for thousands of years before us.
I thank Earth Canvas for the possibility of being involved in these generous activities. In strange ways, I found myself seeing parallels between these social encounters focusing on land and Lynne Kelly’s notion of land as an index of knowledge and memory.
What agency might all this unlock across Australia? Who knows where this Earth Canvass journey might end and what good people might imagine and create together? Sharing in the caring for land is not a bad place to start, however initiated we may or may not be.