A precarious body

I offer here my practice of touching the earth, an earth-based arts practice that I have been developing over 20 years, which is articulated as a 'poetics of place'. What goes on, what is the nature of the encounter, when I do movement in nature or create an environmental art installation, then continue to engage with that place over a longer period of time-weeks, months, years? An ongoing dialogue emerges that is expressed through a variety of art modalities such as poetry, art, photography, sound, song, sculpture, and writing. The textured nature of this dialogue has layers of deeper knowing and being. The stories that emerge are not just human stories. Nothing stays the same; all is forever evolving (Birrell, 2007). Are we now in a period of time that shouts the end of certainty? Life on Earth has already become unpredictable. Global warming, sea level changes, the intensity of extreme weather conditions, melting of the ice caps, mass extinction of nonhuman species, are all concrete changes on our Earth that humans have no solutions for. As a species, we do not know what to do.