Art needn't cost the earth

Marina Turlay interviews Caroline Ross

The title of your book and the course you teach is called ‘Found and Ground’. Can you explain what your philosophy and practice are?

I was searching for the name for my Instagram page. I felt like it didn’t have to be named after me. My practice is super personal, but I don’t believe in ‘self’ as a final thing. And the name Found and Ground just suddenly popped into my head. It was so right! It is its own thing. It gives leaves and clay much more space. I felt like the Earth was speaking. Found and Ground is a crystallisation of all the things I’ve been teaching. The permeability that my practice gives me to other life forms and the space I have to hold for feathers and for earth and stones makes me feel more like a convener rather than director or the person who is in control. I am really happy that Found and Ground now is taking over and I don't have my own website name anymore. And probably in 10 years’ time it will be just like twigs talking and I will be in the background.

Why should a modern artist make natural art materials?

If you want to make art, it would be a good thing to remember how to make it physically. I think those skills are important for an artist. When I’m using a computer, I enjoy talking with real faces but my body doesn't enjoy the interface. And even the most incredible artists I know don't enjoy working with flat screens. For wellbeing, I think, it is important that we keep physical skills. I am physically biased towards physical fabrics, made of natural materials, to leather, to wood, to stone. My fingers like to touch them, my hands like to hold them. There are so many human, physical reasons why ancestrally we might prefer to touch real things, rather than working virtually. I am not modern, I am pre-modern! I find myself to be very archaic and old-fashioned because I like the real, even with its problems. There are a number of reasons why we should do natural art: cultural, physical, historical, practical, apocalyptical (laughs). Not everyone has the time to do that, I understand. But some of us feel that we must.

We humans inherently live in an ‘abstract’ and a ‘real’ world, or as Plato called it, the world of ‘ideas’ and the world of ‘things’. Do you think this practice will help people find a balance between the two?

For me it is about embodiment. We evolved as embodied beings. We are so deprived of the real, and everything is abstract, that people are losing their grip between the words and symbols for other things, and then they believe that words are real in themselves. If I say to my partner, “I love you”, the words signify a real feeling. I think it is unhealthy when the words only relate to the abstract. The marriage of words and images, the marriage of feelings and sensations, thoughts and intuition – all these things that people keep apart – I want them to be together. And for that we need practice. Practice can be pottery, cookery, archery, ikebana, gardening. If we don't have physical practice, we are kind of stuck, because we are only in the symbolic realm, and we don't have embodied metaphors to hang our practice on. If you never cut through a hard carrot and soft cheese with a knife, then you don't know what it is to cut something with effort and no effort. Our ancestors' bodies and minds grew out of physically knowing the difference between how fire felt on fresh and dry wood. So part of me is just worried that we have completely de-skilled ourselves.

Why did you decide to go this particular route? What's your personal journey?

I don't think I decided. I think I was called. I wasn't making any art at all. I was giving up painting and drawing because the art world I was coming into was so depressing. Materials just were not calling to me. I didn't know what I wanted to use. And then I read the book The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth and it woke something in me. I just wanted to draw! And at the same time I went to the Stuff of Painting course where you made your own equipment from scratch in the Renaissance manner. At this time, my eight-year-old friend drew me a Christmas card with a picture of a green man from the cover of the book. And this drawing was so good, so full of life! It was like, “Aaaah, I’ve got to draw!” And all this came together at about the same time, somewhere in 2015–2016. My hands were happy, my brain was happy, my art desire was happy. I was able to make art again. I just needed these different keys to unlock these different parts of stuck doors.

I was already doing some bushcraft which I didn’t think of as ‘Art.’ And I realised that it was allowed in, as well as my cookery, my chemistry. And it was like, “I am allowed to do it all!” So for me it was an alchemical moment when everything came together.

So it was joy and freedom? 

Yeah, right! Joy and freedom. And also, when you get old enough, you suddenly realise that you can do anything (laughs).

Once during our conversation, you said about your practice, “I am the weather.” Can you explain what you mean?

When I make paint from the earth, I am just being the weather. Like the rain and the wind and earthquakes make mountains fall apart and turn into sand – me and my fellow pigment crew just make it a bit faster.

What happens when you take and transform materials from nature? What thoughts and feelings arise?

That’s a very good question. It's different with each material. And this is one of the most important things within the art and craft tradition: how each material changes people. All the crafts I do, they all give me moments like that. We have these embodied metaphors that enrich my language and give me a relationship with a new piece of nature, a new aspect of a great mystery. Every time I have to do something difficult – and feel it, really feel it – I am learning the language of being an embodied human.

What feelings do you experience at the very moment when you take from nature? Do you feel guilty or grateful?

I wouldn't use the words "take" and "guilt". Nature for me is not separate from me. And these are not just nice words. I don't feel guilty, I don't feel sinful. I often feel stupid and not knowing, like a child in my knowledge. And all those religious guilt-things – I just don't trust this language, as it implies that we are separate. When I am gathering, I am looking for abundance. I am looking for things that are out of place, or so-called invasive. I am paying attention to what other life or creatures need as well as me needing it. I am looking for what was discarded, eaten, or used, and what already played its role. It is a great joy for me to be part of composting. The worms and I have a lot in common (laughs).

Today, we are witnessing the phenomenon of eco-trauma, where people feel the negative impact that humanity is having on nature and do not want to take anything from it so as not to disturb its balance. How does your practice relate to this?

I really hear it, and I've met people who have felt the same way, and I've been through that time myself. Firstly, if you build a relationship with nature, this will not happen. Secondly, if you have a living culture, this will not happen. Thirdly, we’ve been told this so we can be scared, so they can sell us stuff and tell us what to do. Fourthly, if you distrust yourself so much, you can almost do nothing, it's like a form of anorexia of the soul. It's like being fearful to eat, to touch, to love. We are part of nature and we are meant to be in it. I am from this land, my bones are made from this chalk, and I am meant to be here.

When an artist or a craftsperson or a forager who is in their right mind, who pays attention to the relationship with the place is picking something, I don't believe that he is taking. How do we know that Earth doesn't want to express itself through humans? I personally think that birch trees want to express themselves through boxes and sap juice. I don't believe everything just wants to stay on its own, solo. The best landscapes on Earth are human managed, like the wild gardens of North America. You can see they have been tended season after season for thousands of years by Indigenous people. Same goes for woodlands in Britain, the managed ones are more ‘wild’ than those which are left unmanaged. 

I feel like modern people get terrified by wilderness. They think it should be left pristine. But it's racist and terribly sad. The only people who benefit from this separation are rich people who will go to conservation areas and buy them up. The people who suffer from this separation are ordinary poor people. Because of this atomisation people become sad and depressed. Some of it stems from industrial revolution and colonialism, and some of it comes from misreading of Christianity. Connection is a medicine for atomisation. We are meant to be with our brothers and sisters: the flowers, the trees, the birds. It took me 45 years to remember that.

Do you feel your practice is political?

My main practices are book writing, art, and teaching. My book writing and teaching are political, as I want to make sure that they are cheap, available, and open for everyone. I give a lot of time to my language, to make sure it is inclusive and clear. I want everyone to encounter the Earth. So my politics is about the questions: how can we get everyone questioning plastic? How do we get everybody touching the earth? How can we get everyone to save waste and make art out of it? When people are involved in art, they feel better. I don't want to blame people for their wish to draw a pretty picture. Draw your pretty picture! Draw your bunch of flowers! The most political thing I can do as an educated, well-spoken, white woman is not use big, difficult words and instead say, “Hey, welcome! Check out this clay, it makes a very good mark!” And when I do that, I don't pretend to be simple. As a political act, I choose to speak in an ordinary way in my books and in my classes. I just really like including everyone.

Now let's talk a little about your teaching activities, since as far as I know, you are now focused on transferring your knowledge. Why did you decide to do this and what does it give people?

There is a river inside me, which is the way to describe my creative energies. I used to try to be a river valley that looked like a funnel, that means I did only one thing: either music or painting or tai chi. And I was not good at it. And it took me a lot of time to realise that I am not a V-shaped valley. I imagined I was a bird flying and looking down at the landscape. And when you look at the landscape from the way above, you don't just see the river like a funnel, you see the whole length of the river. You see the watershed, you see the mountains the river comes from, and distributed trees going in and out. So, instead of a very definite river, you see the watershed gathering all this water together and then bringing it to the sea. And I realised that my way to be creative in the world is like a watershed. All of the water is coming from the landscape into the Caroline Ross watershed and then it comes out through teaching, writing, art. And then it all ends up in the same sea. So I will never be a master of one thing. And that is fine!

The thing I love to do the most, and probably I have done the longest, is teaching. And now I’m starting to think that teaching is probably my actual craft. Ask me again in ten years, maybe I'm wrong (laughs).

When I listened to you when you taught at Schumacher College and read some of your articles, I got the impression that nature was speaking through you.

If that’s so, then I am very happy. I remember when I was the complete opposite of this. When I was stuck in my head, completely unnatural, armoured, angry, and confused. As a young person and young woman I was hard, closed. Even being an extrovert, I showed up and was annoying. I was not open to life, I was not open to nature, I was very scared. It took almost 15 years of tai chi practice and ecological literacy to soften, and this made everything better and more real. So now I don't know what I do. I trust that every day brings opportunities to connect with people, with materials, with nature. And I try my hardest to stop getting in the way of myself and everyone else. I know how it feels to be a shattered, controlling person. It was horrible! And it was horrible for the people who knew me as well. I don't want to be like this anymore. I only have this day, so I come back to the moment.

Tai Chi is an exchange of energy: you open and close, take and give. Perhaps the same thing happens with your relationship with nature and your art practice, with this cycle of reciprocity?

Exactly that! You're right about in and out – it's like breathing, like the tide, like all the cycles of day and night, and all the beautiful binary cycles that we have on the planet. They don't switch like a machine: on-off, on-off. They are born and they rise and they peak and they fall away and come back. It’s like, to be in communication and be quiet, to go out into the world and come back to be on your own. To have this pulse is magnificent.

When I take materials from nature for my craft, I try to balance my needs with the needs of nature. Can you give some advice to people working with natural materials on how to improve their practice?

First, spend a year critiquing the idea that you are taking anything, then questioning whether there is any difference between you and nature, and asking who told you about the scarcity mindset. Who is still telling you that? Who does it serve? Finding what we need in our immediate environment is not shopping, it is not a theft, it is not a rape, and it is not an extraction. Finding and acquiring carefully what you need is living. Indigenous people are practising this lifeway. The reciprocity is just ongoing. How do we know that yellow clay in Dartington woods does not want to be a painting? I personally think that the landscape wants to be art and that it is. I think the rocks want to be carved, I think hairs want to be plaited, I think faces want to be painted. I don't keep too much anymore. Before I used to think like a millionaire, “What should I take? What do I want to leave?” I don't want to even think in those terms anymore. Instead, I ask, “When I was last on this piece of land, what was our relationship? Did I leave a little bit of my energy? Do I take a little bit of that rock, or not?” And we just hang out quietly. 

What is the difference between artwork created from self-made, natural materials and one made with materials from a store?

It's a long time since I've made a piece of art with store-bought materials. Before, all the enjoyment and interest came from the subject matter and from how well I did it. Whereas now, the drawing sometimes begins a year before when I make the charcoal. A story upon a story upon a story, and I haven't even started the drawing! It's like being in a long-term relationship when you go back to the place where you collected the material. It's like the meeting of old friends.

What do you think might be an obstacle to people creating their own artistic materials?

People think they can't do it. This is why I want to make simple books and make it easy for people. They also probably think that, as they live in town or city, they won't find anything. And again, that's why I want to include the urban environment in my next book. The third thing is that people haven't been shown how to look. The greatest gift you can give is attention. Nature, the world, the universe, the creatures – they are loving attention. Most people didn't learn how to pay attention to the phenomenal world and how to be with. So that's an obstacle. It's hard to notice things.

After your class on cordage weaving from natural materials, I can't just pass by nettles and brambles anymore.

That is exactly it! And nettles are the best example, they were right there all along, and then your attention is drawn to them. Suddenly it is a friend who is popping up and there are 50 or 100 of them! (laughs) I had the same experience when I learnt to pick mushrooms. There were no mushrooms before, and then suddenly there were so many of them. The mushrooms were always there, it was just my attention that was missing.

You wrote, "As I work my way through learning how to make everything I need, I find nothing is wasted, by-products become raw materials, mistakes become solutions." To me this phrase conveys the joy of exploration and self-sufficiency. Do you think we can improve our ethos and well-being with this practice?

Although there is a self-sufficiency aspect of it, what really speaks to me is interdependence. All the materials and I are in ongoing reciprocal relationships. I depend upon nature. I want to stay in a relationship with my environment. And the best way I have found for me to do that is to stop thinking about myself as an outsider.

How do you think this practice can be integrated into other areas to increase awareness and nature connection?

I don't know, I guess we will find out. I do think it's beneficial. We need people to teach it, and people who want to learn it. It depends on places like Schumacher College to let things happen. My hope is that a community of people keep supporting each other and just getting out there.