Chantal Jackson: March - July 2025
My purpose for this residency (done over 3 stints with a total of 10 days) was to deepen my thinking and practice around making art that I can consider ethical, respectful, meaningful and connecting.
This curiosity and need arose out of my own increasing discomfort with current methods and reasons for making art. I have loved creating art in the forms of drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture from childhood. My art practice has been an important means of engaging with my inner world and the world around me.
As the environmental crisis deepens and the intensity of self-expression and self-revelation spiral, my awareness of the extractive and often toxic nature of art materials, the heavy weight of too many beautiful things and an emptiness I find in most conceptual art, I find myself repelled by most art practices, many of which used to bring me joy. I no longer feel comfortable using materials that are based on linear extraction and destruction. I no longer believe that my human desire to create from the world, self-regulate through art, or explore my inner world justifies practices that are harmful. And I cannot fully step out of the systems into which I am woven. I find myself stuck, or perhaps more usefully, in a state of what Zoe Coombe in her 2025 thesis on Val’s work calls, aporia: in need of understanding the knots that bind in order for something new to open out.
My residency comprised a mixture of activities and modes of being. I was interim caretaking which supported my sense of engagement and responsibility towards place. Reading from Val’s library and newer volumes relating to environmental ethics, environmental humanities and decolonisation supported my search for kindred spirits and possible frameworks for understanding where I sense we (those of us caught in modernity/Western binds) are ‘with art’. Walking in the forest and listening kept me grounded and connected with the other beings at Plumwood. Working with materials I found on site I attempted to co-create artworks by endeavouring to remain guided by the materials, the feeling I get from place, as well as inevitably shaping my own culturally shaped self into them (see photos attached). These were left in the house as decorative items to be returned into the soil when they are ready. I also began work on an Artist Manifesto.
Plumwood Mtn makes me stop and listen for Val’s voice, to take in her ancestorship from her work and her presence. The forest feels like it holds teachings, too, a place to listen and learn about what is needed, what will nourish, what medicine I might have to offer to these chaotic, disastrous, grief- and horror-filled, yet fecund times in which we are all so inextricably entwined.
With deep thanks to Plumwood Mtn and its beings, the Walbunja people: present and ancestral, Val herself, and Plumwood Inc. for allowing this time and place to be.
Artworks made from local clay gathered from the track and fallen plant material also collected on site. Intended for table centrepieces and bookshelf ornamentation. To be returned to the soil when caretaker or working bee participant deems their life done.