distance between us
ee portal, Tara & Clayton Windatt
Écart Art Actuel, Rouyn-Noranda, QC
review in Esse Magazine, 101 New Materialisms, 2021 by Maude Johnson
ecoSOS (COVID-19)
fibre, brush & pigment…
sustainably harvested
small batch processed
plant & minerals
hand-mixed to produce ecoSOS
…each carefully selected, earth pigment hue travelled a great fossil fuelled distance to me…
entwined…
inside cultural ecocide
pandemic
greed, development & encroachment…
not only within the Yunnan province of China where horseshoe bats reside…
but also from
Northern Ontario nickel city
- tailings ponds central -
nestled within
this contemporary biodiversity extinction …
- Elyse Portalmaterial spiritual commons
Contemplating COVID-19 within the context of the sixth mass extinction, ee portal looks to ecological crises (local & global), as well as the text "Enlivenment" by Andreas Weber, to acknowledge "the ideology of death" that has brought us into this situation.
Oak Entanglements
oak entanglements is a sensual, interspecies poetics within the globally rare, bur oak savannah on Manitoulin Island.
distance between us is experimenting with how we, as artists, can find a “new normal” within the global pandemic and digital environments. The distance between us collective brings together two households: the Windatts (Tara & Clayton Windatt) in Sturgeon Falls and ee portal (Elyse & Emilio Portal) in Sudbury. Working across two separate Northern Ontario locations, our ad hoc group mediates emotional and physical isolation through creatively reaching out to each other. We are digging out unrealized digital archives and documenting new intimacies with our home locations. While COVID has reassembled our practices to our personal ecologies, we believe that the materials being gathered at this time need each other to be fully alive. We are humans living in pandemic lockdown realities and need creative exchanges. We have also become acutely aware of the potency of exchanges between ourselves and other-than-humans (during lockdown it is much more accessible to hug and share breathing space with a tree than a human). These everyday, accessible exchanges are simultaneously embedded among awareness, creative resiliencies and wellbeing.
view our online exhibition: distance between us (thoughts section)