Joelle Sandfort | What Do I Mean When I Speak of Place?
Photo: Joelle Sandfort
What do I mean when I speak of place?
At the end of May, members of the Alternate Currents Working Group met with the Naturalist School at Waubonsie State Park to listen to bird song, walk the hills and ravines, and discuss ideas about place and space. This post contains some of my thoughts from the day and explores my connection with a place that is significant to me. I am thankful for my friends who help me consider and reconsider what place is and means.
Like many others, I was immediately enchanted the first time I visited the wooded, loess hills of Waubonsie. Five years ago, I gathered there with artists, poets, and naturalists for a two day retreat. We wrote stories of places that were meaningful to us, looked at plants, and hiked in a painfully slow way that I would eventually come to love and know as a “saunter”.
Returning frequently to the park, I began to recognize zebra swallowtails, scarlet cups, bluestem and witch’s butter. As my familiarity grew with the place, I noticed an internal shift: the more I looked at what should have been familiar, the more I was surprised by what I saw.
Winter frog swimming under the frozen pond
Spring iron-eating bacteria making rust colored and iridescent water
Summer monarch butterflies feeding on coyote scat
Fall orb-weavers and webbed obstacle courses
In addition to unavoidable strangeness, there is always evidence of impermanence in the park. The Sericea lespedeza has overgrown the bluestem in the hilltop meadow and the honeysuckle has expanded further into the understory than seems imaginable in a few short years. Despite best efforts, these species often evade human measures of control and aims of preservation.
There are countless examples of people who, in an effort to contend with instability and change, impose human ideals of order onto the places they contact. The ecological and art writer, Timothy Morton describes this by making a distinction between place and space. They write that while place is beyond human control, space is a human-centered framework that allows for the measurement, extraction, conquering and division of places.
In their view, place is specific to time and individual bodies. It means something different to each being. A human walking a trail has a different experience of the place than a spider who made their web between two trees on either side of that trail. Human places often overlap the places of other creatures, making them unpredictable and potentially challenging to navigate. This instability is unsettling, but could also nudge us to more carefully consider how we interact with the places we find ourselves in.
Assumed ideas of place create barriers to acknowledging the responsibility we have to each other and the places we live. Likewise, myths of purely human-made spaces, untouched by the whims of storms, diseases, or animals inhibit our ability to recognize that our place is a shared one, with other beings and their places that intersect, avoid, and contradict ours.
When I speak of place, I mean that wherever one goes, they are in place. I mean that it does not belong to one individual, species, or thing. I mean that it is not only a landscape to move through. I mean that it moves through bodies of flesh and stone in the form of memories, imagination and the senses. When I speak of place, I mean that it is never the same again, it is an inconsistent and moving image.
Joelle is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Omaha, NE. She graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University with a BA in Art and K-12 Art Education Endorsement. Joelle has exhibited her work at Tugboat Gallery and Sanctuarium. She is currently the organizer of Fleabane Gallery, an alternative exhibition space for emerging regional artists.