Slow Dancing is created in collaboration with a mated beaver pair, the three of us actively (and temporarily) interfering with the flow of a wetland stream and the lifeforms in that stream — the beavers, through the construction of their dam, and I by making simple formal dance postures with my feet in the stream nearby. The list of participants does not end there, however. Each of the wetland plants and all the life forms in that stream are also intimately involved in this entanglement.
Various thinkers in evolutionary biology define environment as being nothing but the phenotypical expression of DNA code. This means that our DNA does not stop expressing itself at our fingertips, or in the case of a beaver, at their whiskers. Rather, they would argue that a beavers DNA, as an extended phenotype, continues to expand as far as the effects of their dam might reach (Dawkins, 2016).
My own research invites us to imagine these individual expressions of DNA as they intra-act with the extended phenotypes of others in a unique and ephemeral dance.
Through this ever evolving body, I experience the world in all its physicality, and am sensitive to its energies because I am a part of it. I am particularly drawn to wetland environments, because they have a similar resonance to the place in which I was born, Lake of the Woods and its abundant wetlands. For this reason, wherever I travel to, I somehow find myself resonating with the wetlands of that area. Wetlands are the places I can be fully ‘alone’ yet never feel lonely. Rather, I feel embraced, held, sung to … loved. My experiences in diverse wetlands have taught me that it is not necessarily a specific place that makes me feel at home. Instead, it is the cumulative orchestral rhythms and vibrations of various milieus (Grosz 2019).
Questioning traditional binaries, or the myth of separation, my paintings always seem to function as part of a larger grouping. Placed alongside each other, I also imagine the works from Slow Dancing to embody the slower rhythms of the earth, expansion and contraction, systole and diastole.
The works for Slow Dancing were created with thanks to the generous support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.