A note on extraction

Building new models for creative practice

With the tree nursery on pause for the past two weeks, I thought to get cracking on some things I have been mulling over. Here are some thoughts from some notes on the subject of extraction.

An artist came to visit the nursery a couple of weeks back. They were on residency in the area and wanted to check out Myross Woods. They were making new work. The work would be a mesh of many things and be made with “de-colonial” sensitivities. To me such work has the potential to embody the essence of what art is trying to do just now. Some art just does these things anyway and some things that are not even categorsied as art are in their nature de-colonial. I am writing in the context of contemporary art. So I will speak from this corner.

A few weeks later I was on a video call with an artist and they asked me what I meant when using the term extraction. I spoke about the experience I had with the artist at Myross (without naming them) as an example of extraction.

I had a good conversation with the artist at Myross at some point in the day. They had a tour of the woods that morning. As the day was getting on they came to say goodbye and that they would leave after they took some footage of the “Killarney Moss”. They had meant to say the Killarney Fern. Myross is home to some Killarney Ferns, not a large amount. It is listed as endangered on the National Biodiversity Data Centre data base.

I found the act of filming the rare fern problematic in this circumstance. I’ve been at Myross for a few months now and perhaps I have started to feel a real connection to the place and in that a sense of protection. Maybe that was the instance that I had this realisation?

To film the fern is to capture it, to have some sort of ownership of its image and its identity. To film the fern knowing that it is rare is also problematic; to knowingly have access to something scarce increases its value. The artist may not be aware that in filming the fern they may have actually be operating with colonial sensitivities, contrary to the description of their process.

This is not me saying we should ban lense based media in our native woodland, but in the context of contemporary art and process to perhaps imagine new ways to engage with this very precious subject matter.