FIELD NOTES

Notes on Correspondence

My paintings are responses to intra-actions I have either witnessed or participated in during my time in specific wetland environments. Many of the entanglements I have encountered are so small, they defy being documented en plein air. So I have begun documenting the smaller intra-actions I encounter using video. Then I respond to the moving images in my studio through painting. This is a form of immersive transcription (Shields 2018), and a means of correspondence (Ingold 2020) for me.

Whether I am outdoors in the wetland environments, or in the studio, it is a process of listening to the many voices of that landscape with my entire body, otherwise known as deep listening (Oliveros 2005). I am engaging reciprocally to and with, movement, gesture, rhythm, sound, and light as I paint. The process is generative, and is an embodiment of, and release of that rhythm, vibration, information, or knowledge. As I am responding to specific wetland organisms through painting, this type of response is akin to writing a letter that will never be read by the intended recipient. I think of these particular works as Love Letters.

Corresponding, according to anthropologist Tim Ingold, requires a shift in stance from ontology (or how things exist) to ontogeny (or how things are generated). He argues, (as does Barad) that such a shift has important ethical implications:

“For it suggests that things are far from closed to one another, each

wrapped up in its own, ultimately impenetrable world of being. On

the contrary, they are fundamentally open and all participate in one

indivisible world of becoming. Multiple ontologies signify multiple

worlds, multiple ontogenies signify one world. Since, in their growth

or movement, the things of this world respond to one another, they

are also responsible. And in this one world of ours, responsibility is

not for some but not others. It is a burden that all must carry”

(Ingold 8)

Ingold believes that if our world is in crisis, it is because we have forgotten how to correspond and that the shift from interaction to correspondence entails a fundamental reorientation, from the “between-ness of beings and things to the in-between-ness” (Ingold 9). This thinking again, echoes theories of Karen Barad whose

“notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction”) which

presumes the prior existence of independent entities or relata) represents

a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra–actions

that the boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena

become determinate and that particular concepts (that is, particular

material articulations of the world) become meaningful.”

(Barad, 139).

More simply, “We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (Abram ix). By remaining conscious of the fact that these intra-actions I participate in are the natural occurrence of an interconnected world, I am more aware of the transformative power of each small correspondence I partake in — and these are the ones I am aware of. For I have learned from experience, there are many of which I have no cognisance at all. With each encounter, I become more sensitive to the life that surrounds me and I feel more fully human. Because of this, I can’t help but see the world as extraordinarily alive. I guess I can be confident that the one certain outcome of my practice is that I am continually co-evolving with all of the life I encounter along the way.

Leslie Sweder