pied midden: issue no. 30 : interasking : daniela naomi molnar

lilacs out of the dead land

A cold spring where I live, hung with veils of sleet and hail, means the flowering clouds of chartreuse big-leaf maple canopies float for longer than usual in green-gold raptures against navy skies before succumbing to the deep green of early May. Knowing that when the warm times come, how quickly the lush moss on the forest floor turns coarse and stiff and the soil under it becomes dust (tinder), I beg this coolness to linger as long as it wants.

Like many people, I think, I’ve always thought that poet T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month” because of the propensity of its weather to turn from whispers of new warmth to bitter chill and ice. In this particularly cold April, as I thrill in the lasting frosty air, I’ve repeated to myself more than once how now, ‘it’s a warm April that feels crueler, Mr. Eliot.’ But then I looked the poem up. And got chills.

Turns out, Eliot wrote ‘The Waste Land,” the mythic modernist masterpiece, in ’22 (1922, that is) in response to the devastation of WWI, but also, and perhaps more acutely, to The Great Pandemic, when hundreds of thousands of people died from Spanish Influenza and hope was so utterly obliterated that the exuberance of Spring made a mockery of humanity. Right?? He went on to write the lyrics for Cats, the jolly Broadway musical, so maybe there can be hope for us too.

So is this April the The Cruelest Month 2022? Perhaps. A lot has happened these past few winters, and the modernist malaise that Eliot voiced so early on has intensified beyond what he could have imagined. Somehow, though, a hundred years later, the relentless life-force of Spring persists, brilliant new shoots unfurl in the ashes, the “peace which passeth understanding” remains. Still, it seems right that this month’s Ground Bright pigment, called Wandering Winterkill, is a bone black, a remnant of winter deaths held up against the bared young greens. My friend, collaborator, and fellow pigment-explorer, Daniela Naomi Molnar, is the contributor.

Daniela is both an acclaimed visual artist and poet. Her work has been the subject of a front-page feature in the LA Times, and she was recently awarded the Omnidawn 1st/2nd book prize for her book, Chorus. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she taught for many years, and is a founding member of the Board of Directors (and a backcountry guide and educator with) Signal Fire Arts and Wide Open Studios. Daniela and I co-designed a course, the Poetics of Pigment, which we taught together in 2021 and plan to offer again this year.

What follows is our interview, which you’ll see is more of a back-and-forth conversation than you’ll usually read here. Daniela has the last word — I couldn’t bring myself to mar its perfect resonance with appreciative chatter. When you read it, you’ll understand what I mean. And so, I’m going to say it here: Thank you Daniela, for being a collaborator, for engaging me and Wild Pigment Project so wholeheartedly, for your images and words, for Wandering Winterkill, and for your always-the-more-beautiful-question.

interview with daniela naomi molnar

WPP: You and I first met in 2017 on Shoshone-Bannock lands in Idaho when you were a visiting professor at a month-long Signal Fire Wide Open Studios program that I was attending. The air was smokey from the fires that raged throughout the West and our group was camped out in a narrow spot by an icy blue creek. You gave me some powerful feedback on a piece I was doing that involved making subtle shapes with my foraged pigments on some large boulders. I remember your look of disbelief when I said all the paints I was using were made from rocks I'd gathered.

You told me about work you'd done that involved inscribing landscapes with poetry. We talked about education, and academia, and operating outside its bounds. It felt like an auspicious connection, and indeed it was.

What do you remember of our first meeting?

DNM: It was, indeed, auspicious. I remember the color of your eyes and colors of the pigments you were using -- they were all colors that seemed to glow in the smoke. I remember the constant creek song alongside the hushed tone of the group. There was a sense of seriousness and concern among us because the fire seemed very close. It was maybe the first summer of constant fire that I had experienced, a now-common symptom of climate chaos in the American West. I remember your sincerity, intensity, and curiosity — all qualities that I cherish. I remember our conversation by the creek and how much I loved the work you were making, how it spoke to the poetry project I was working on at the time, which created temporary installations of poetry in public places. You were working with pigments that would persist for a while but then find their way eventually back to the earth. I was working with poetry in a parallel way. I remember my time with you and the group as freeing, simple, profound, and challenging — qualities that I also associate with the making of art.

WPP: Yes, that's such an apt description of that time for me. Thanks for showing me that memory through your lens. It seems so fitting that we met in smoke and your Ground Bright contribution this month, Wandering Winterkill, is the bones of animals, carbonized by fire. I admire the way that as an artist and poet, you fix a piercing gaze on the challenging, summoning courage to move through what's painful and find the illumination hidden inside the discomfort. The theme of grief comes up frequently in your work. Wandering Winterkill is made from Devil's Club (Oplopanax horridus) and bones you picked up during mostly solo (right?) hikes in Western backcountry, and then later transformed at home with a long, slow open pit fire in your backyard. I'd love to hear you unfold some of the emotion this pigment carries for you personally.

DNM: That’s a huge, beautiful question — my favorite kind. I appreciate that you see my artistic process as courageous. It often feels a little rash and self-destructive because there's luminosity in grief and I do believe that, as a culture, we need to go towards grief in order to move through it — but there's also just a fairly endless quantity of pain in the work I do. Going towards that grief, embracing both its pain and its luminosity, has taught me that there's scant difference between grief and love, and that is a lesson that I return to many times every day. It’s a touchstone for me.

Yes, my explorations are solo. I often go solo out of circumstance but it's also become a sort of spiritual practice for me to go towards my fears rather than away from them. Being alone in wild places was scary at first for me, but I've increasingly found a profound sense of peace in my time alone in the backcountry. I feel seen and held by the places I’m in, in ways that I haven't often felt seen and held by people in my life. There's a word for god in Judaism, Ha'Makom, that translates roughly to "The Place." I think I've felt some version of this, the sacred force of a place that extends beyond the sum of its parts. Another Jewish conceptualization of god, is “The one that is space and the source of space. The one that is the world but whom the world cannot contain.” This is what place feels like to me in the backcountry, alone. I’m held by a force that cannot be broken or quantified because it is always already there (everywhere).

This pigment consists of the carbonized bones of winterkilled animals: elk bones from the Oregon Coast Range; cow bones from the Oregon Outback; Pronghorn Antelope bones from the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming; and owl bones from the Washington Cascades. It's important to me that these animals were both domesticated and wild, native and non-native to their ecosystems; they were all members of our current complex, impure version of nature. These animals all foraged, flew, ran, ruminated, altered and were altered by their ecosystems. They all lived until the moment they succumbed to the brutal force of winter, weakened by old age or disease or injury. So this pigment contains an enormous amount of obvious violence. I was often overwhelmed with grief and love while making it — many tears fell into that backyard fire.

Parts of the process of making the pigment also felt immensely violent — I had to cut big bones into small pieces with an angle grinder, a deafening power tool that covered me in rancid, white, death-smelling dust. The fire necessitated burning the dead, cut, dried bodies of trees. The heat from the metal fire pit I was using killed the new, electric green spring grass below and around it. When I removed the bones from the tins in which they carbonized, each was a radiant dark sculpture, each an utter perfection of form. I proceeded to crush each perfect form to dust with the force of my body and will as applied to a mortar and pestle.

And there was more complex violence, too: I bought the tins from a local Goodwill, but they were manufactured in some factory thousands of miles away by people whose lives are delimited by the forced circumstances of their labor. I drove to the Goodwill, consuming fossil fuels. This act of consumption helped spur the ongoing ecological, sociopolitical and cultural war on our planet while also releasing carbon into the atmosphere that fuels the violence of climate chaos. The wood to make the fire likely came from public lands — lands that you and I ostensibly own and fund with our taxes but whose fate we have little say in. The wood bundles I bought were wrapped in plastic that will persist for an unimaginable eternity in our bodies and the body of the world.

This is a natural pigment like you or I are natural mammals.

In this pigment is the reciprocal, requisite violence of the ecological web and and the complicated, confusing violence of our sociopolitical, cultural, and economic structures. What can we learn from this violence that is also vitality? What questions might it provoke for us about how to live ethically and honestly as fellow animals in our beautiful, broken world?

WPP: Wow, Daniela. I think the gorgeous reckoning of materiality that you describe here is, by its nature, a rippling out of concentric questions... questions that have, for many of us, been severed from their answers through the effusive sanitisation of capitalist industrialization. Petroleum products (plastics) can be made into anything on earth, but whatever it is (a plastic flower, wood veneer, spray "cheese") it unavoidably maintains a vacant materiality, a sensory hollowness and orphaned quality. The violence of paint-making takes us in the other direction: as destroyers who pulverize real rocks, flowers, bugs and bones into quiet vials of uniform color dust, we undo the story of material emptiness that plastics broadcast with their suffocating ever-presence. These dusts are gateways back into relationship, not just with other beings, but with our own ability to literally build and destroy with known substances we encounter every day. They're opportunities to be in relationship with materials connected to their places of origin, without the intermediaries of factory, big box store, and the thin layer of plastic that seals in nearly everything we buy. Pigments are proof of relationship, of kinship, of being changed by an encounter.

I'm still thinking about your question-in-a-question: how can we know what to ask about how to live in alignment with our values in a broken world? In our 'Poetics of Pigment' course, which we co-instructed together last Spring, many of our group discussions focused on pigments as "actants" — participants in action — and also, as a term that evolved organically from this discussion: "interactants." One answer, it seemed to me, was that we can't ask the questions alone, or even by thinking them. We ask the questions by living them together, by "interacting" — interasking? — them.

Poetry and your relationships with pigment materials are interwoven and co-evolve in your creative practice. I was recently asked — by Jordan Eddy, the director of form & concept gallery, who is himself a writer and also a very good question-asker — how my writing informs my visual work and vice versa. For you, the two are even more intertwined. To reign this question in a bit, lest it loom too huge, I'll ask you this: can you describe a current, specific relationship you've observed between your poetry and a particular personal experience with a material you use in image-making? A revelation or insight — an interasking, if I might — that came of the marriage between the two?

DNM: Thank you for these generous, nested questions. I love the important distinction you make here between varieties of violence. Violence can, indeed, encompass kinship and reciprocal encounter. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about predator/prey relationships and the complex ways that consent and empathy are part of that exchange. Australian ecofeminist and philosopher Val Plumwood’s account of being attacked by a crocodile, my own experience of being tracked by a mountain lion, and poet Natalie Diaz’s reflections on predator/prey relationships in her Indigenous Mojave culture — all have offered me glimpses into ways that even violence can be a consensual, empathetic exchange — even as it is simultaneous with suffering and death. We hunt for pigment, after all. We are predators. We are also prey, and pigment making is a type of becoming prey/prayer. As predators, we can ask our pigment prey for consent. The prey can assent or deny. All of this interasking can be true at once.

This type of interasking is true of both poetry and pigment. Both allow for non-resolution and insist on all-at-onceness. I’ll explain what I mean by this by talking about a recent interasking I encountered with Prussian Blue and desert ochres. I started making cyanotypes, a printmaking process that relies on sunlight, when I was doing a residency in the mountains of northern New Mexico about a year and a half ago. I stumbled into this work and was using it playfully and without conscious intent. I was treating the process more like painting than straightforward printmaking, mixing in desert ochres I found while hiking in the canyons, creating strange and unpredictable results. I felt a strong sense of collaboration with the varied animacies/interactants around me — pigments, stones, wings, plants, branches, the sun, the ochres, the Prussian Blue — all were co-creators of those paintings.

What I didn't know when I began making cyanotypes is that the primary pigment in the cyanotype process, a synthetic organic pigment called Prussian Blue, is made of prussic acid. Prussic acid is also part of the chemical makeup of Zyklon B, the lethal gas used to kill prisoners in Nazi death camps. “Zyklon” translates to “cyclone”; the “B” stands for Blausaure, “blue acid,” synonymous with prussic acid. Some of the death camp bunkers bear traces of the same arrestingly vibrant blue that characterizes cyanotypes.

All four of my grandparents survived death and labor camps during the Holocaust. Both of my grandmothers, Rosalie and Olga, survived Auschwitz. When I learned about the history of Prussian Blue, I realized that the paintings I was making were a record of ongoing intergenerational trauma and grief. They were also, simultaneously, tokens of transformation, records of attempts to shift that trauma.

By all-at-onceness, I mean a relationship with time and place that is non-linear — vertical rather than horizontal. In my experience of co-creation with Prussian Blue, New Mexican ochres, the sun, bones, plants, and feathers —

I was with my grandmothers in Auschwitz —

I was walking in the Jemez Mountains —

I was a glossy desert raven flying through a red canyon —

I was a pale celadon stone in a dry creekbed —

I was my mother and my father and my brothers —

I was the many lives unlived and lived —

All of this was all there at once, not in succession, not in geographical or temporal order. This is a major difference between a story and a poem. In a poem, everything can happen at once. The same is true for a painting or any other visual art form — everything can, and often must, happen at once. Pigment is an animacy that nurtures this all-at-onceness.

In this all-at-onceness lives inherent contradiction. There is grief, love, suffering, violence, tenderness, desire, fear… There is predator and prey. There is prayer and silence. Poetry and pigment don’t request a resolution of these contradictions. Capitalism forces us to resolve into products. We are required to become neat packaged entities (wrapped in plastic) that seem stable and unitary. It exerts the same force upon the art we make, the relationships we create… capitalism exerts a maniacal drive for all things to be flat and accessible, easily named or otherwise consumed.

But poetry and pigment resist these directives. They do not resolve into products. They insist on holding contradiction, complexity, and ambiguity.

I often mix two or more pigments together when I paint, as I did with the desert ochres and the Prussian Blue. The pigments I mix are often at odds with each other in conceptual or chemical ways. For example, I might mix mineral pigments with synthetics, or botanical pigments with animal pigments, or pigments from two distinct bioregions. The pigment combinations react with each other in unpredictable and often strange ways. I enjoy this lack of control — I am a student of this form of surrender. I am interested in the way these mixtures invite that nimble, irreverent all-at-onceness and non-resolution. The way they interask.

WPP: I’m breathing deep, taking in the force of the experience you’ve had with Prussian Blue and your personal, generational history. It’s pretty stunning. Being drawn unawares into relationship with this material that played such a horrific role in a history that’s deeply intertwined with your family history is, to me, evidence of a potent energetic collaboration. Ochre and Prussian blue — a wild earth and a synthetic chemical used in death camps — co-exist in a mixture that echoes the contradictions of grief itself, the imperative to keep living when sorrow seems too painful to bear. Your blending of these two echoes the grief of our planet in peril as a result of human actions. The damage, and the terror of possible futures can seem overwhelming, but we must keep loving what’s here. This reminds me of another of Prussian blue’s mysterious contradictions: Prussian blue is one of the most effective medicines for treating radiation poisoning, by removing excess radioactive cesium and thallium from the body.

In their spareness, pigments as vials of dusts invite inquiry — and they deliver. The feeling you must have had the moment you learned of Prussian blue’s dark history, and its very precise relationship to your family: a sudden shift from casual fact into electric resonance, from meaninglessness to message. Since you mentioned your experience of being tracked by a mountain lion, I’m reminded of my own encounter with a mountain lion, from the other side. To me, it was a moment that gave me that feeling of pursuing, and finding answers more shockingly alive than I could have imagined.

I was walking in the red desert in Arizona, in a familiar place I’d walked many times, in my early twenties. I’d read a lot of books about tracking animals, but felt that actually following a living being by examining the scant whispers they left in the sand far exceeded my capacity for observation. I actually felt a little irritated by claims that it was possible. Like so many things in my world, then, it felt as though seeing animals outside (other than hopelessly familiar, common ones) was an experience from the past, or from books and movies. That feeling was just one piece of my bitterness towards the life that seemed possible for me, hedged in with roads, machines, architecture, and systems upheld by predictability.

It was in that sort of mood that I wandered along the red sand, until a small tuft of fur stuck to the end of a long cactus spike caught my eye. Farther ahead, I saw another. I noticed faint grooves in the ground, leading to more fur. I followed. The fur and the grooves led me on, up a hill and down towards a wash. They increased — more fur, deeper grooves. My heart leapt with excitement: I was tracking. I was following someone real. A spirit of calm delight entered me: there was an answer at the end of this trail. It wasn’t going to peter out into nothingness like the others. I raced along joyfully, buoyed by satisfaction. Not for a moment did I consider that I might be in danger, or that my pursuit would lead to me to anything other than an impressive but inert visual finding, a more satisfying sign of animal life than usual. Large clumps of fur and heavy drag marks led me down into the wash where a rocky bottom obscured the drag marks but the fur clumps were still visible. My head was bent in concentration and so the body of the deer, splayed open and gutted, was a shock — but a triumphant one. I had arrived. My imagination filled with metaphor and story. In a revery, I turned to go. That’s when I saw the cougar, standing a few feet from me up the creek bed. I froze.

In an instant, the cougar bounded up one side of the bank and I scrambled, half-falling, backwards up the other. From the top I could see that the cougar had climbed up into a cottonwood tree and was studying me. I backed away with my arms in the air. When I thought that I was far enough away, I turned and ran. But I didn’t go far. I sat on a hill at a distance, watching the faint form of the big cat in the tree and listening to my heart pound for a long time, until I decided it would be disrespectful to stay any longer. I went home changed. It was the moment when my life moved from the imagined to the real. It felt like a message meant for me, and the message was clear : there are questions with answers that satisfy out there, beyond what I could know. If I could find traces of the questions, they would lead me to something that mattered. A story that also felt real.

I stepped on the live wire — the living vein — that is the predator/prey relationship that day. Remembering it, your questions come back to me: What can we learn from this violence that is also vitality? What questions might it provoke for us about how to live ethically and honestly as fellow animals in our beautiful, broken world? What springs to mind here for me, is more a state of being than an answer. It’s perfectly expressed by a phrase in your most recent poem, “Dream Vein,” which you say you wrote “towards” me (!) in part in response to dialogues we’ve been having over the past couple of years. It’s one of the phrases that sings to me in a soft pulse after hearing you read this poem: the ripe zero. The line is:

The story goes inside. Inside the story lives a ripe zero.
Inside the story is an exit from the isolate self.

The zero is ripe, its emptiness is its fullness, it holds everything and nothing, it’s the shape of planets and the tops of our heads, it’s hanging just above us, ready to pick. This is the place where questions give birth to more questions.

“Dream Vein” feels like an anthem of sorts to me, a chant, a dirge, a lullaby both into and away from “the isolate self.” It’s both a bandage and a shroud, meant to heal through the reminder that the net of interwoven relationships is a binding force, but also to invite death, to pierce us, to break open, to cut vents for grief to flow out and for parts of ourselves to exit.You’ve made an arresting film version of the poem, set to eerie, rhythmic music, which I’ve watched a few times now and am riveted by.

Daniela, this poem and really all your work is rife with beautiful, scary, vivifying questions. Are there any in particular you’d like to leave us with today?

DNM: Wow, Tilke, that story of the mountain lion is a profound tale. Thank you for sharing it. There are moments in our lives that we live up to and then away from, moments that leave us permanently altered. A moment can last a second or a decade. It sounds like yours lasted maybe a few hours. We don’t see the world, we see what we believe. When belief shifts, so does the world.

Here’s how I came face-to-face with a mountain lion: I had hiked several miles to the edge of a large meadow and was sitting with my back to a thick forest of fir and spruce. I was mourning, in a tired way, the ragged edges of any claim to truth. I had been sitting for about an hour when I felt myself being looked at from behind. I turned, instinctively, as animals do, in the direction of the gaze, and there he was, staring me in the eye. He sat at a distance about the length of my body. A long, impossibly slow moment of recognition set in. This moment probably lasted two or three seconds but it felt like an eon. A kaleidoscope of honey-colored pieces fell slowly, so slowly, into place, arranging themselves around a word, a centripetal force: cat.

We see what we expect to see, which means that we mostly see the world as a hall of mirrors, reflecting our expectations back to ourselves. A large predatory cat watching me from behind at a close distance was not what I was expecting. It was only when the two pointed ears in front of me connected in my brain to the pointed ears of my house cat that I understood what I was seeing. Until then, I was as stymied by the honey-colored vision before me as a newborn. It was what I imagine the world might look like to a child before she learns the tidy and domesticating symbolism of language. There are shapes, colors, sensations. There is sweetness and there is pain. No expectations, no predictions. No past or future, no names.

I couldn’t see the cougar until I could name him. Names are an axis of belief.

Color is an entity that allows, or compels, us to continually shift our beliefs. Color is, always, a potent energetic collaboration. Color is an ecosystem consisting of at least three entities:

material

light

organism

By organism, I mean the witnessing entity — body, heart, mind, spirit. Each of these entities is itself an ecosystem and their relation creates color. There is absolutely nothing stable about color, ever. It is an aperture of belief. The poem repeatedly returns to this idea, awestruck again and again by this unbelievable, quotidian fact.

Yesterday was Passover, tomorrow is Easter, Ramadan is ongoing this month — we’re in the time of death and rebirth. Now is the time of resurrection, unshackling, renewal. The stored energy of winter is moving through the limbs of trees and elk, cows and owls, humans and antelope, crows and squirrels, every blade of grass, every dandelion, every rock.

While we’ve been exchanging these ideas, I’ve had this phrase moving through me on repeat:

Every force evolves a form.

It’s a Shaker aphorism about the value of solid, simple design. But I think it has wider relevance, too. A form is more than a physical shape. The air has a form. Breath has a form. A storm has a form. As you named, yes, emptiness has a form, and it’s also the form of fullness. A form is space and the source of space. A force is space and the source of space. The world is made of forms and forces which the world cannot contain.

I’ve been wondering what forces have evolved my form. What forces have evolved your form? What forces do you want to be evolved by? What does your form teach you about its forces? How might your form change if it was in relationship with different forces?

This pigment, like all pigments, is a force and a form. I hope it evolves more forms in the world that are portals to radical conviviality with grief, with love, with life in all its insistence. In that wild, pendulous moment of eye contact with the cougar, he and I were one consciousness, one aperture, one name. His voice in my body was clear. He said: go, live.

(end interview)

****

Until Next Time,

Stay Unresolved,

( & feel free to write to me at info@wildpigmentproject with your <3 & your more-beautiful questions & thoughts )

<3 Tilke

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pied midden: issue no. 30 : interasking : daniela naomi molnar