Can The World Mend In This Body?
By Andrea Bowers. Eco Grief Extinction Series, Can the World Mend in This Body? (Quote by Deena Metzger; Bird: Bachman Warbler, Declared Extinct October), 2021
When I saw these two images in tandem, I was overwhelmed with grief. Eco-Grief Extinction is how the artist, Andrea Bowers, titled it. The women trudge through layers of sorrow, carrying high their precious burden, the extinct rare songbird, the Bachman’s warbler.
For several years, researchers carefully entered the old growth forest the birds had inhabited, stopped every 400 feet, played a recording of their plaintive call every 30 seconds, waited and waited for a response as they traversed the 3,900 acres of the Congaree National Park, for 166 hours, seven days and nights, but heard nothing from the tiny bird, heard only the dead silence of extinction.
Imagine extinction. Imagine that your species will no longer exist. Imagine the gathering evidence of the decline, and one’s helplessness against it, the increasing silences, the unanswered mating calls, the failure to reproduce, the empty nests, the loss of nesting sites, the scarcity of food, rampant barrenness, and desolation everywhere. Imagine it. Pick up the great weight of this disappeared one, as Andrea Bowers has done.
But let us not mourn this one without realizing that each one of us reading this is responsible and equally threatened. Bachman’s warblers vanished as a consequence “of nesting habitats being subsumed for agricultural use, because of widespread ‘collection’”—that is murder—“of the birds for public and private museum specimens, and their deaths from hurricanes,” increasing in frequency and strength due to climate change “and human development.” In other words, we killed them off as we are killing off one after another species. Until, inevitably, we will be last.
The exquisite grief that the women are carrying in the icon of a rare and tiny songbird, forever silenced, is the Earth and our future, all our futures, our unavoidable fate if we continue so.
I looked to the ground, literal and figurative, upon which they walk. The cardboard collage implies literal ground, the Earth. But it is not simply the Earth. I stare at this photograph of a Russian attack. Donetsk Airport, February 2015. The patterns are resonant with Bower’s collaged cardboard bases.
I am reminded of so many images of the last months—the frightening spectacle of one deadly bombardment after another, devastating everything. How long can the Earth survive this? The ground of the women’s sorrow is the Earth devastated. And like the Bachman’s warbler, Earth is threatened with extinction. This is what we must understand: every war we fight is a most violent and devastating war against the Earth.
By Andrea Bowers. Eco Grief Extinction Series, How You Treat Us Is How You Treat the Earth (Quote by Deena Metzger; Bird: Molokai Creeper, Declared Extinct October 2021, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, Netherlands; Figure Design: Carolyn Janssen), 2022
And now—the next question.
Can the world mend in this body? That question is at the core of Bowers’ work. It derives from the ending lines of my poem, “Between the Worlds.”
Can the world mend in this body? That’s the question, isn’t it? How can we heal this? Can the world mend in our bodies?
Perhaps those of you reading this ask the same. How can the world mend in our bodies? We don’t know the ways, but we must discover them. With each extinct species, we know less about healing. Each species holds knowledge that is essential to the continuation of all life.
By Andrea Bowers. Eco Grief Extinction Series, We Do Not Dare the Vortex of Undoing What Must Be Undone in Order to Heal (Quote by Deena Metzger; Bird: Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Declared Extinct October 2021; Figure: Joseph Gasking, The Rose Elf, 1893), 2022
I awaken each morning and ask the question and then offer myself to the elusive but necessary task of healing war and extinction.
May we find the ways.
Andrea Bowers: Can the world mend in this body?
A solo show of new works by Andrea Bowers was on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. “Titled “Can the world mend in this body?” the exhibition embraces a broad range of media: richly textured paintings on recycled cardboard, intricate colored pencil drawings, elaborate neon pieces, and a documentary video. All the works reflect the artist’s investigative and activist relationship to the environment and social justice. An ardent ecofeminist, Bowers explores loss and stalwart hope for a healthier planet that values the rights of women and nature.
“Debuting the artist’s “Eco Grief Extinction” series, the show starts with three pictorial elegies on collaged cardboard bases. Each depicts a bird species that has vanished: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Bachman Warbler, and Molokai Creeper. Among twenty-three species that the U.S. government declared extinct in 2021, the birds are depicted alongside women in states of suspension and remembrance. The bold juxtaposition appeals for the dignity, safety and rights of both. All the words in the cardboard paintings come from Deena Metzger. As the healer-poet writes, “How you treat us is how you treat the Earth.” The pieces were also exhibited at kaufmann repetto, Milan. The piece will be at the Berkeley Art Museum.
correction: a previous version of this story incorrectly identified a species of bird depicted in Andrea Bowers’ artwork. This error was corrected on May 1, 2022 at 10:30 am pt.