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WATCH & LISTEN | Video & Audio Archive
THE SOLDIER & THE POET
Collaborative poem by Claire Beynon & Elizabeth Brooke-Carr
Narrated by Paul Sorrell & Claire Beynon | Music by Chris Zabriskie (Creative Commons)
Narrated by Paul Sorrell & Claire Beynon | Music by Chris Zabriskie (Creative Commons)
HIDDEN DEPTHS | Poetry for Science
Embark on a lyrical under-ice voyage in the company of a science diver, a pteropod, a flotilla of silver and white bamboo boats and an ancient giant of the uni-cellular world: tree foraminiferan, Notodendrodes Antarctikos. Painterly and metaphorical in its approach, this short film addresses a number of scientific and metaphysical themes in a novel and thought-provoking way.
LETTERS FROM THE SKY | Love the Waters | Collaborative poem by international writers:
BREAKING NEWS | A Prayer for Syria/Myanmar/Gaza
with music by Darin Sysoev (Russia)
One morning, after reading a New York Times article titled, NEWS HEADLINES: SYRIA – NO VICTIM TOO SMALL, I paced agitatedly around my house unsure what to do. The prompt came: make something. So I began working on a short film combining stanzas from a poem I’d originally written in 1994 in response to the genocide in Kosovo and Rwanda with lines borrowed directly from the New York Times article I had just read.
The film BREAKING NEWS – A prayer for Syria was my attempt to build a bridge between two vastly different realities (mine and theirs) so that through the process of identification, the situation is shared, and becomes ours.
I wove in a soundtrack by composer Darin Sysoev, a Moscow-based composer only to find that when time came to acknowledge his contribution, his music was not listed under the Creative Commons license as I had thought. Because of the strict copyright laws, I could not post the film online without his permission. The internet facilitated a process that would once upon a time have been nigh impossible. I was able to track him down within a couple of days; I wrote to him via Facebook, explaining my project and the ethos behind the film. Since I was not in a position to offer him money for his contribution, I invited him to consider the project a collaborative endeavour. After viewing what I had made, he graciously accepted, granting me permission to include his exquisite music. A meaningful exchange ensued and a bridge built.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS | A selection from recent years
KINDLING THE FIRES OF CHANGE | Creative Imperatives in a Burning World
SRI Online Conference | April 2020
Read the full transcript/listen to the audio recording here
SRI Online Conference | April 2020
Read the full transcript/listen to the audio recording here
PROGRAMME NOTES:
In his poem The Cure of Troy, poet Seamus Heaney wrote,
In his poem The Cure of Troy, poet Seamus Heaney wrote,
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‘… So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells. Call the miracle self-healing: The utter self-revealing double-take of feeling. If there's fire on the mountain Or lightning and storm And a god speaks from the sky That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.’ |
The way we approach our lives, work and relationships is rapidly changing as far-flung corners of the world are brought together in virtual space, and diverse groups of people enter into novel and democratic conversation with each other. It’s as if a new continent has risen up in our midst. For many, this new and vivid experience of global connectivity and internet-driven community is a combination of comforting and confronting.
As systems around us break down—the old must make way for the new—it’s becoming increasingly important for us to interface with each other in real time and space. Bayo Akomolafe invites us into a new consideration; ‘The times are urgent,’ he says, ‘let us slow down.’ Yes. We need to slow down if we’re to fall in love with our Earth again; we need to slow down if we’re to be fully present in our relationships with others; we need to slow down in order to foster a duty of care that extends outwards in all directions.
Our many world crises will only be solvable via creative means and to the extent we open and engage our hearts. Fellow artist Jane Adams writes that in days gone by, people carried fire nests from hearth to hearth. ‘Today we have matches and lighters. We have forgotten the magic, the tenderness of embers passing from person to person and place to place…’
Art-making invites us back to the hearth and to heart-centered community. Creative play ‘ups’ our joy quotient; its deeper purpose and magical directive is not to capture and fix our world into place but rather to open, liberate and celebrate it. The Arts offer us time and space to re-engage wonder, to listen and attend, to contemplate and problem-solve. When we ‘make’ alongside others, we practice hygge—genuine hospitality—towards ourselves, one another and the wider world.
In this presentation I speak into the dual themes of constructive and destructive fire; the ancient tradition of fire nests; the fires of creative imagination; the Iroquois notion of the Children’s Fire. I share a new series of paintings prompted by the Australian bushfires, one of which portrays the Mother of the World as a female fire-fighter. A composite of divine feminine archetypes, this woman bears witness to the fires of transition and transformation. She keeps vigil and holds protective space; in her arms she carries the animals who suffered in the bushfires. She leans in towards us. ‘The times are urgent’, she whispers. ‘Let us slow down.’
CB 2020
As systems around us break down—the old must make way for the new—it’s becoming increasingly important for us to interface with each other in real time and space. Bayo Akomolafe invites us into a new consideration; ‘The times are urgent,’ he says, ‘let us slow down.’ Yes. We need to slow down if we’re to fall in love with our Earth again; we need to slow down if we’re to be fully present in our relationships with others; we need to slow down in order to foster a duty of care that extends outwards in all directions.
Our many world crises will only be solvable via creative means and to the extent we open and engage our hearts. Fellow artist Jane Adams writes that in days gone by, people carried fire nests from hearth to hearth. ‘Today we have matches and lighters. We have forgotten the magic, the tenderness of embers passing from person to person and place to place…’
Art-making invites us back to the hearth and to heart-centered community. Creative play ‘ups’ our joy quotient; its deeper purpose and magical directive is not to capture and fix our world into place but rather to open, liberate and celebrate it. The Arts offer us time and space to re-engage wonder, to listen and attend, to contemplate and problem-solve. When we ‘make’ alongside others, we practice hygge—genuine hospitality—towards ourselves, one another and the wider world.
In this presentation I speak into the dual themes of constructive and destructive fire; the ancient tradition of fire nests; the fires of creative imagination; the Iroquois notion of the Children’s Fire. I share a new series of paintings prompted by the Australian bushfires, one of which portrays the Mother of the World as a female fire-fighter. A composite of divine feminine archetypes, this woman bears witness to the fires of transition and transformation. She keeps vigil and holds protective space; in her arms she carries the animals who suffered in the bushfires. She leans in towards us. ‘The times are urgent’, she whispers. ‘Let us slow down.’
CB 2020
THE HUM OF THE PARTS | Our Global Honeycomb
The Hum of the Parts is a series of solo and collaborative art projects that explore the resonances between personal journey and collective story. In this presentation, Claire Beynon will share her studio explorations, focusing specifically on two works-in-progress. The first - A Honeycomb Journal (canvas, embroidery thread and beeswax) - uses the template of the multi-chambered honeycomb as a way to document and bring to light the happenings of our times. The second – a large-scale painting titled Song for a Unified World - draws on the map-making research of cartographer Gene Keyes and the late architect Bernard Cahill (1866 – 1944).
WORDS ON WATER
SRI/USR Conference, Phoenix, Arizona | April 2014
"It is all one water. A finger in a tide pool brings our shores together." Marylinn Kelly
SRI/USR Conference, Phoenix, Arizona | April 2014
"It is all one water. A finger in a tide pool brings our shores together." Marylinn Kelly
There’s a potency and intimacy peculiar to web-based communities that overwrites conventionally-perceived limitations such as age, political bias, ethnicity, kronos time and measurable space. The web is a mighty equalizer – like the ocean, it wraps us around, drawing our continents together. We take our place around the virtual table and at the press of a key, enter worlds we might ordinarily not have access to, with people we might ordinarily never meet. Before we know it we’re engaging in a depth of communication that has all the elements of privileged encounter and sacred space. If water is the medium of the unconscious, might we consider the web its metaphorical equivalent?
Borrowing words from a friend, ‘We have a choice to pick our way around the fringes where wonders can be found, sure enough, washed up out of their element, or to throw ourselves in, half-naked, alarmed and gasping but soon elated, afloat, finding that 'it' — the ocean, the community of people — is holding us up. And 'it' is all shot through with wonders and toxins, nutrient-rich streams and currents bearing death, predators, prey and symbiotic arrangements . . . held together in the mare-mother-matrix of a common life’ [Penelope Todd]
During these times of accelerated awakening, I’m drawn ever more to poetry, music and the moving image as powerful communication tools within our global arena. As our world’s clamour and confusion increases, so listening and stillness are being recognized as vital agents for peace, advocacy and transformation. This mixed-media presentation tracks across a range of real and imagined territories, from recent collaborative ArtScience projects in Antarctica to the daily rhythms of work in my Dunedin studio. I share my creative processes, thoughts around ‘chaos and coherence’ and what I’ve come to call ‘the necessity for protest in the form of poetry and pause.’
CB | Dunedin 2011
SMALL POINTS OF LIGHT
SRI Conference, Phoenix AZ, 2012
This presentation is a celebration of planetary complexity and exuberance. Light is the linking motif. A child's painted angels — adrift in a lime-green sky and dressed in up-to-the-minute fashion -- come face-to-face with a swarm of orgiastic fireflies. A woolly bear caterpillar perseveres through fourteen light-less winters before spinning its way into a new cycle. Ancient uni-cellular organisms add luminosity to the White Cliffs of Dover and ballast to the Egyptian pyramids. In an underground laboratory in Upstate New York, microscopic masons embark on a collaborative experiment with artists and scientists, creating new forms out of the bodies of their ancestors. . . A sense of wonder contributes light to a world tinged with peculiarity and uncertainty.
Two research seasons in Antarctica (2005 - 2008) gave rise to a series of curious and compelling Art-Science collaborations with US and Australian scientists. I speak of my encounters with this other-worldly place -- a fierce and lyrical wilderness of ice and light — and, too, of the mysterious worlds that opened to me beneath the lens of our field station's microscope. Reference is made to the work of poet Emily Dickinson, 19th Century biologist Ernst Haeckel, protistologist, linguist, violin-maker and esotericist Edward Heron-Allen (1861 - 1943) and, too, the Tibetan master Djwal Khul with his invitation to "establish upon the earth a great station of light which will illumine the whole of human thought".
Claire Beynon, 2012
Two research seasons in Antarctica (2005 - 2008) gave rise to a series of curious and compelling Art-Science collaborations with US and Australian scientists. I speak of my encounters with this other-worldly place -- a fierce and lyrical wilderness of ice and light — and, too, of the mysterious worlds that opened to me beneath the lens of our field station's microscope. Reference is made to the work of poet Emily Dickinson, 19th Century biologist Ernst Haeckel, protistologist, linguist, violin-maker and esotericist Edward Heron-Allen (1861 - 1943) and, too, the Tibetan master Djwal Khul with his invitation to "establish upon the earth a great station of light which will illumine the whole of human thought".
Claire Beynon, 2012
THE URGE TO CREATIVE LIFE
SRI/USR Conference, Phoenix, Arizona 2013
SRI/USR Conference, Phoenix, Arizona 2013
| the_urge_to_creative_life_|_claire_beynon_|phoenix_az_2013.pdf |
POEMS | Selected Readings