AC Interview | Lydia Cheshewalla + Sarah Rowe
GROUNDING, Installation image
We recently sat down with artists Lydia Cheshewalla and Sarah Rowe to talk about GROUNDING, their highly collaborative exhibition at Amplify’s Generator Space in Omaha, which explored reciprocal human and more-than-human kinship systems through acts of somatic co-regulation with place, land, and earth. Listen to the full conversation below and read through the transcript for links to additional resources. If you’re on the go, visit Amplify’s Anchor page to stream the discussion on your favorite podcasting platform.
Transcription
Speaker 1: Lydia Cheshewalla
Speaker 2: Sarah Rowe
Date of Interview: September 15th, 2022
List of Acronyms: LC = Lydia Cheshewalla; SR = Sarah Rowe
[LC] My name is Lydia Cheshewalla and I'm a transdisciplinary artist, living and working across the ecological landscape of the Great Plains. I'm an Osage woman and my work primarily focuses on healing and community and kinship and environmentalism and empathy. Those are the things that I'm really passionate about. They guide my practice and influenced GROUNDING.
[SR] I'm Sarah Rowe. I'm a multimedia artist based in Omaha. I am Ponca and Lakota. My work spans a lot of mediums but is always focused on community and care, especially land stewardship and care for the other beings we share this planet with.
[LC] I feel like there are similarities in our work and we’re also friends. Sarah, you were one of the first artists, and also one of the first Indigenous artists, that I met when I was living in Nebraska. It just seemed to make sense for us to work together, make an exhibit together. For me, what led to the conceptualization of GROUNDING was knowing that I was going to be working with you and being interested in our tribal relationality and where we both come from. Our tribal ancestries existed together thousands of years ago. We’re both part of Indigenous tribes that were mound builders, that were part of Cahokia and now both of us have contemporary art practices in a contemporary society. Those dichotomies, often false dichotomies, of traditional vs contemporary, rural vs urban, nature vs civilization are interesting for me. I think, maybe for both of us, we’re asking how do we draw these distinctions?
I know those distinctions are also very real, because in my conversations with people who are in highly urban areas, as opposed to rural part of the state, there's kind of like tree blindness. People forget that they're actually in nature or surrounded by nature. Exploring those concepts was exciting to me. And I think both of us are passionate about land, both of us are passionate about healing practices, and the show became an invitation to get out there and put your hands in the dirt and realize that it's right there. Art doesn't have to be inaccessible. It doesn't have to be so precious. It can be dirt. Playing with the idea that all art is derivative from earth material, even as we've moved into more synthetic forms of materials, like, acrylic paint is important.
[SR] To touch on that, I think is really important that you say “just dirt.” As we've talked about this material, this relative, this living being--the dirt, the soil, the mud--everything that that's in it is more complex than we can even fathom. It's much more complex than any synthetic material that we use in art making. So, it's really interesting to return to that, to make these marks which were seen as primitive and uncivilized. And these are the very things that that make our museums, artifacts made with these substances. It's a strange concept when you think about it and an easy one to spiral out into.
[LC] I think that's what I love about it. Dirt is passed over or literally walked upon. You don’t notice it. You move over it. So many people in the Western world have that idea about land, especially land in the middle of the country, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, the Great Plains states. They're viewed as places for like passing through. It's just a place you pass over. Flyover states. We wanted to elevate that relationship. Yes, the earth supports you. It's the land you're on, but it's not just any dirt. It's the dirt of this place. It's dirt with a deep history, deep lineages. It's tied to people, it's tied to place, and to histories that supersede human histories. There are histories that are deeply about the land itself. That was really exciting to me working with the medium that we chose and questioning whether we think of it as a medium or a collaborator when we're thinking in terms of kinship with more-than-human beings. Land is an entity and soil is a collaboration of multiple entities. The amount of organisms that exist within a single teaspoon of soil is just more than there are humans on the planet, which is interesting to think about. It’s hard to think about sometimes, because of relational discrepancies, I guess. It's hard for us to consider microbes. It can be hard for humans to come out of the anthropocentric scale. I enjoyed playing with those concepts for that reason and the questions they open up around what it means to invite a community in to interact with their own land, with their own place? What conversations can come out of that? How will people relate to it? What are the nuances when it comes to how much you say and how much you don’t? How much do you let people just experience and feel?
[SR] I think creating open space based on play kind of led that dance. I love that you describe the soil as a collaborator and not a material, as were the people that joined us for the opening, especially on that collective wall mural. It was like watching this cosmic dance, the way things move and collide and grow and build. That's exactly what's under our feet always. Connecting with land in a very small, but meaningful way hopefully sparks people's interest and ignites some passion for protecting nature. That is the goal. We all have different connections and indigenous wisdom is important in that, but the challenge living in an urban setting is finding those connections and building community around them. We're still having these initial conversations about LANDBACK and it's not about vengeance or, or rage. It's about healing.
[LC] Absolutely. LANDBACK is so near and dear to so many of our hearts, especially in this age of climate change. I think bringing people into an awareness, no matter how large or small, is crucial. It’s a reminder that they're allowed to have that relationality because relationality to the world doesn't just belong to Indigenous people. We embody it in our belief systems more holistically, but we're all in relation to earth and land. It's all related. When we can tap into the idea that it's all related, that it's all part of the same system, that it's all informing itself, then a sense of responsibility toward healing comes forward. Hopefully, a desire for it follows.
I feel drawn to it. We both do. I want to take good care of my relatives, my more-than-human relatives, because they take such good care of me. Who would I be if not for the land and the soil and the sky and the air and the plants and the animals and rocks? Who would any of us be?
[SR] Right. How do we know the earthworms and the bees are less important than we are? We need to be humble and be grateful to be where we are, especially in the food chain.
[LC] Just because we've been able to conceptualize separation, through consciousness, or whatever we would like to say belongs only to humans, that doesn’t make the concept true. I was reading the other day and learned we share a quarter of our DNA with trees. Even though we've travelled these diverging paths, we're not that different from the things around us.
[SR] I love that you speak about trees. When I was young coming into my own and feeling anxious about my place in the world, a line from Desiderata, a poem by Max Ehrmann, helped me: “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Those little simple truths put things into perspective. Then you can breathe and see your path clearly again.
[LC] Absolutely. It was exciting to do this work as contemporary Indigenous artists. It's interesting, I think, to be any artist, particularly in America, doing work related to land, or to ephemerality, or with nature. Influencing, changing, shaping, remediation, renewal focus the direction of how I work. Environmental aesthetics always seems to be contextualized within the Western canon by the land art movement, which came out of the 60’s and involved a bunch of white guys. I’m not knocking it because I love a lot of that work. Andy Goldsworthy, yes. I love that work. But I always like to point out that this work started a long before them, especially with early residents of North America. I'm in Cahokia, which was once a huge like Mound City. That is land art. To me, the processes of prescribed burning and caretaking for prairie land for Prairie ecology is land art, too. The prairie ecosystems in the middle of the country developed alongside the relationships humans have made with those places, with those plants, with the soil processes, with grazing animals, with insects, and with knowing how all those things work together. So, it interesting to contextualize this work in the Western canon when for me, it's just part of everything. It's part of the experience of being human. It's deeply indigenous. It's deeply human.
In GROUNDING, we had a small mound in the gallery that Sarah built. I just love that. I think that's so important. I think part of being an artist is being able to pull things through time. Even though our mound was small, it was created by two Indigenous artists who come from Cahokia lineage in the area where our people were originally. I think that's really beautiful.
[SR] Definitely. Cahokia is obviously a very special and powerful place. I was sad but not surprised that I never learned the history of that place in my early education. When I moved to St. Louis, I was fascinated when I visited that site. Being in the presence of such deep history is so important.
[LC] And we have to keep acknowledging our own histories, our pre-American histories. This land of Turtle Island has really been through a lot, especially over the last several 100 years, and the land remembers. I think it's important that we remember it as well and that we remember the relationships that exist through place and through land that proceed through time. I only lived in Nebraska for about seven months. I came to do prescribed fire training through the Lincoln Parks and Rec Department. To arrive as a stranger to the land and then learn about it was really exciting. When you're in a place for a long time, it can become like disenchanting or too familiar. Sometimes, if we allow it to, it can fall out of the sublime. It stops being the magical place it is. So, it was fun for me to come in as an outsider almost and absolutely fall in love with the land. And I got to then reflect that back to the community. I love this community. I love where you are. I love this land. You guys are so lucky. You’re so lucky to have this land and to be in this place.
The soil that I worked with in the gallery was loess soil, which is spread finely all over Nebraska. It piles up into the Loess Hills in Iowa. I was totally fascinated and smitten by this really, really fine glacial dust that has a deep lineage of being formed thousands of years ago when there were still glaciers on this continent. It predates us. It’s so much wiser than us and has so much more experience. It’s also so giving. The soil is abundantly rich from those extreme processes it went through. That is, somewhat unfortunately, part of why there's so much Big Ag in the area because of the loess soil and the lushness of that deep time.
That soil we brought into the gallery ranges from 4,500 years old to 159,000 years old. That's almost beyond what I can conceptualize. Bringing that kind of magic back reminds people that that we’re surrounded by it. It's blowing through the air. It's deep in the water. It grows our food. It's highly valuable because of that, but also invaluable. You can't actually put a price on what sustains us.
[SR] I think it's important to talk about that disenchantment or taking things for granted, especially the things that sustain us, the things we come from, the things we will return to. To not be reminded of that daily is dangerous. That's why I think our daily rituals, sacred or not, have to be intentional. They should be a reminder, or a blessing to show our gratitude for these things. It can be something so simple, like putting your hands in the dirt and saying thank you. That's the catalyst for a lot of the ceremony or rituals I do in gallery spaces. It's about more than looking at art in a gallery. It becomes more of an exchange and then storytelling can happen and a deeper appreciation for our time on this earth hopefully happens. Hopefully, it ignites inspiration for others to connect in that way. One of my daily rituals throughout the whole pandemic has been getting on my bike to say hello to my bird friends. I feel like I'm five-years-old, but I notice more. I've seen herons and pelicans, geese, owls, songbirds. I love them all. I bring gifts for them and put them in the soil. Because they only let us see them when they want to be seen. I know that it's a gift to see a blue heron.
[LC] Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that's important, too, acknowledging that like that we are sharing this planet. I was reading an interview with an entomologist about the sharp decline of insects over the several years. Because they're so small, or because they're so obnoxious to us at times, we're indifferent. We don't even think about them. Part of his ritual was to wake up every morning and say, “somebody's missing.” It was his way of staying tuned into that loss. Insect life underpins everything. We don't exist without insects. If insects go away, so do humans. So does everything. We are so arms linked in this together. During the pandemic, when humans had to be a little more sequestered in their activities, we did see a brief flourishing. Animals came back into spaces that we have taken from them and that we don't like to share. I love seeing the human response to noticing these things. I think it moves us towards more acts of remediation. People are more interested in how to share this planet in a way that like keeps us all moving forward so that we don't lose each other, so that we don't have to grieve so many losses.
I also think, to your point about building the rituals and moments where people can come in and experience more than just art in a gallery space, during the opening, we had live music and we burned medicines. It was fun. It was conversational. There was an ambience. That is ceremony of holding space is important. It brings people more wholly into a space. It allows them to open up a little more and experience it differently. It takes away some of that Western art canon preciousness and brings it into a more connected place. People don't have to be scared about messing up the work if they get too close. We're encouraging you to put your hands in the dirt and then put them on this wall, which can feel taboo in white cube spaces. It breaks people out of their own preconceived ideas.
[SR] Right. And the thoughtful conversations within that space, with people from many different walks of life, were so eye opening. And I really hope people walked away feeling nourished and grounded. Good medicine for everyone. I think it was really special to share that.
[LC] It was so great seeing people that I wouldn’t have ever pegged as gallery goers coming into that space and playing. Play is so important. I feel like, walking the conversation back a little, there's a pressure to become serious or jaded growing up. It's been a long walk back away from that to realize that I disagree, not just as an artist, but as a human, with the notion that you can't have fun, you can't play, if you're a certain age. I don't believe that. I think it remains crucial for humans to laugh, have a silly time, and not let seriousness box us in. The only way we're going to get through anything is if we're all grabbing hands and laughing.
[SR] Right? Otherwise, we're definitely doomed. Humor is key.
[LC] I got a pocket microscope recently and it's just kind of driving that point home for me. I feel really blessed because I have three sets of eyes. I've got my regular eyes that let me see the world. I have my pocket microscope that lets me see this micro world. And I have a pair of binoculars that seem to be magical. Every time I put them to my face, I see eagles. That’s not a lie. It's exciting to have the ability to shift our perspective in so many ways.
[SR] I bought myself two travel kaleidoscopes. They look like little marine machines, like old ship parts or something. I feel really great carrying them in my pockets and turning the world into fractals. Shifting your perspective in that way is play. It offers a wholly new way to inspect your environment, which is really exciting.
[LC] Play is the way back in. I think play is a way back into deep meaning, deep connection, joy.
[SR] And hopefully it leads to an appreciation that life is magic. And it can just be magic. And why would you want it to be anything else?
Sarah Rowe and Lydia Cheshewalla are from Plains Nations that overlap.They share a kinship through their respective Lakota and Dakota lineages, and Ponca and Osage Nations. In GROUNDING, they speak to the shared experience of forced removal across distances that articulate the imposed binary of "urban" vs "rural" Indigeneity.
Lydia Cheshewalla is a transdisciplinary artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the ecological landscape of the Great Plains. As an Osage woman, her work primarily focuses on community, emotional awareness, environmental justice, ephemerality, kinship, and art as healing action. She is currently working on becoming.
Sarah Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.