Art for the living Earth
My name is Clare Celeste and I am an American collage and installation artist based in Berlin. I bring thousands of individually cut and arranged images of flora and fauna together into lush and intricate compositions that span from works on paper to immersive installations.
My collages reflect my impressions of nature. I have been assimilating to different cultures and environments my entire life – having lived in Brazil, the US, Italy, Honduras, Argentina and Germany. Collage allows for me to pull together naturalist imagery from across the globe and create a cohesive visual story. Much like my own memories.
As I use naturalist imagery from 1900 and earlier, many species in my artwork have already vanished or are vanishing. This adds a layer of ecological urgency to my work. To address this aspect of my practice, I have an ongoing collaboration and creative dialogue with biodiversity scientist Louisa Durkin of the Biodiversity Institute.
It has been sobering, and sometimes daunting, to educate myself on the urgency and severity of the ecological crises we face. Because of this, joy and nourishment are on my mind a lot these days. Friendship, good food, inspired conversations, laughter. All the things that replenish us. I see them as essential to this moment in time. Living through a mass extinction event is an experience deeply saturated in grief and anxiety and trauma.
We must, if we are to continue to work and bring our full selves to the beautiful task at hand of healing our planet, also heal and care for ourselves. Renew and recharge and realign. Find our joy. We are all in different places on our journey, but the fact that our planet is in crisis is ever-present and it is felt in ever more direct ways. So how do we bring our full selves to this moment in time? How do we, as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “dance for the renewal of the earth?” I am very interested in the inner work and relational reservoirs that can help us hold our uncertainty, grief, longings, and joy in a time of planetary crisis.
I just finished the book “Women Who Run with Wolves'' and am also currently reading Sacred Instructions- both books packed with Indigenous, matriarchal wisdom. This process of connecting with indigenous, matriarchal and old earth wisdom has allowed me to rediscover and re-see my own artwork. I think that rekindling a spiritual or emotional or simply deep love connection to our planet is an important step to healing the earth. Indeed, I think it is required to reconnect to our place in nature if we are to survive this next era. This practice of connecting is different for everyone- I know that for myself, a mist cloaked forest is the most incredible and spiritual cathedral I can imagine.
Another very life-changing moment was reading the book “All We Can Save - Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis” by Ayana Eliza Johnson, and forming a book circle. The experience of reading this book together with women from around the world has been transformative. As our member Brooke said today, "we are all so different, from such diverse walks of life, and when brought together, our different stories and voices create a symphony." The experience of holding a book circle showed me how powerful women coming together can be.
Reading "All We Can Save" has truly enriched my life, changed the fabric of my being. I feel attuned to my inner world, I feel attuned to nature, and I feel a deeply rooted sense of what I want to do with the rest of my life. I want to work to heal our beautiful planet. And I want to do that through vulnerability, through storytelling, through art, through creating spaces for communication. I want to do it through love. Fierce and bountiful love.
If there is anything I can share with others, it would be to not hide away from the pain of seeing the world as it is. We are living in terrible and magnificent times. Never before have humans seen destruction on this scale, and never before have we held the power over so many lives and future generations in our collective hands. We hold the future of our earth, the decisions we make today, tomorrow, matter more than at any other time in our species' history. What an honor to be alive at this moment. To be given such an urgent and beautiful task, to heal our planet and one another.
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Visit her website https://www.clareceleste.com/
