Annie Martin (& Sandra cowAn) Q&A
By Ado Nkemka
Photo courtesy Annie Martin. (Left to right) Sandra Cowan and Annie Martin taking a selfie on shrubland with mountains behind them, in the distance. There are pine trees on the left of the photo and the sky is blue and very clear.
New Works Marketing Intern Ado Nkemka spoke to inter-disciplinary artist Annie Martin about “Kinship with Trees.” The theme for the April 21st soundwalk emerged in a collaboration between Annie and Sandra Cowan (who, unfortunately, couldn’t be a part of our conversation that day). Register here and read this Q&A to learn more about Annie, Sandra, and the inspiration behind this upcoming soundwalk. This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Ado: Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves?
Annie: I am an interdisciplinary artist. I would say I work within the field of visual art, in that I interact with other people who identify as visual artists, and that's the category I would apply to, most likely, if I were applying to Canada Council, so it's kind of like an identifying label. But my work is really interdisciplinary. I have done quite a lot of work with sound, making installations that comprise live audio feeds and sometimes recorded sound. In the sense of a visual artist, I'm very interested in the language of surface and embellishments. I am a painter, and drawer and also have worked a lot with textile. I really get excited about the way that our visual sense and other senses interact with surfaces that have been inscribed – that have some kind of texture or inscription upon them, how that interacts with our sense of hearing.
So a lot of my work is – it's not scientific, in its method whatsoever – engaged with finding that space where I believe our senses actually interact and inform each other and mingle and go back and forth. I just find that so interesting, because I think it frees us up from this instrumental way of thinking about the five senses that we identify and, and puts us in a zone where we're just sensitive beings and we sense in many ways beyond those so-called five senses as well. I think this is actually being documented and explored in pretty rigorous ways now, because we're talking about senses beyond the so-called five senses. So that's kind of where I live in terms of my making but my work is hugely diverse in terms of what it looks like.
Do you want to say a thing or two to represent Sandra – about what she does or her background?
Sandra is also quite inter-disciplinary in the sense that she works in a number of media in art, so she's a maker and an artist. She's also a librarian and interested in information science and archives. She is an avid walker and walking has taken a big part in her art practice. And that's kind of one of the places where we intersect and have decided that we really have something in common that we can work from.
She's also really interested in – I guess it's a shared interest. Both Sandra and I have an interest in Buddhist philosophy and other – we’ll call them – philosophies that are being advanced right now that speak to unsettling human exceptionalism and point us towards a place where we're much more connected than we might go about our day thinking. So we're connected to other humans, but also to the more-than-human and to plant life and to all the sentient, and if you will go that far, spiritedness in the world. I maybe shouldn't characterize Sandra too much on her behalf, but I think that I would say that's something that we also share and work from.
You’re founding members of the Lethbridge Walking Arts Collective, could you tell me a little bit about what you both do there?
So we founded the collective – it was informal. At first we came together and decided that we would collaborate on leading some walks, that are kind of a hybrid of a listening walk, and something that goes beyond – So I'll go back to the idea of a listening walk in a moment, because that takes me back to my own practice, but we were getting together and devising walks and then we were invited to participate in an international conference. It was during COVID so it was completely remote and virtual and so rather than calling ourselves by our names, we decided that we would form a collective and then apply and propose something to the conference under a collective name. And thinking also well then there's a door open for other people to join the collective. And we have a couple of people who we aren't formally collaborating with, but who come to all of our walks when we do them in Lethbridge, and who are kind of part of our group as well. I think we both like the idea of collective creation, because it's not so much about “this is my work, my practice.” It points to the shared quality of these walks and the practice in general.
A group of five people encircle the trunk of a large, ancient poplar or cottonwood tree. They are close to the edge of a small river. There is much greenery around them; the season appears to be late Spring or early Summer. The people are leaning against the tree with their palms on the trunk. They appear to be listening.
Where did your idea for Kinship with Trees come from?
There are a couple of threads there. Going back to Sandra and I having a shared interest in sort of more-than-human sentience, looking at indigenous frameworks, and also Buddhist frameworks, and just being really curious, reading a lot, and also having a lot of conversations and discussions and walking together. Our conversations are often during our walking when we're brainstorming and working on things together. So just trying to articulate something and we realized that not only was it difficult to articulate in language, because I've been reading some really smart people like philosophers, continental philosophers, who can't find language to talk about the idea that trees for example, might have sentience or a kind of aliveness that goes beyond being a sort of vegetable
There's a kind of consciousness of some kind. It was just really hard to find language for that in the English language and in the current vocabulary that we have that didn't sound – my partner's expression is “hoogity boogitty” or “woo woo.” What we realized was that, actually, there was an experiential dimension that we needed to go through. So I undertook this, kind of, formally, when I was invited to put together a presentation for the Canadian New New Music Network. Also, during COVID, I decided that I would take that on, and I would try to devise some practices that would basically put me in a situation where I had to really confront my sense that I was separate than and different than, and, in some sense, in terms of my cognition, better than conscious trees.
What is, to you, the distinction between a soundwalk and a regular walk?
I encountered soundwalks through a woman named Hildegard Westerkamp, who I think Rebecca makes mention of as well. She's one of a number of people who have done soundwalks and Hildegard Westerkamp, who's based in Vancouver, is also a new music composer, electronic and sound art composer. She has a long history of being involved in radio and documentary sound – so, documenting environments – and she was part of an acoustic ecology research team called The World Soundscape Project. Her approach was my first encounter with soundwalk.
I loved so many things about what she did and I credit her every time I give a walk. Because what came out of her approach, for me, was the sense of lowering your filters. She really talked knowledgeably about how we focus our hearing on sounds that are useful to us. And we filter out a whole lot of sound, necessarily, in order to navigate the world. That's our brain doing that, not our ears. It's our brain selecting for things, and at the same time, in that selection process, there's a filter of judgment: “nice sounds,” “bad sounds,” “sounds I want to hear,” “noise.”
At the foundation of her approach was the idea that we would lower those filters. And she has some actual physical methods and some techniques for helping people to do that, little exercises. What happens when you walk in the world with that sense of having lowered your filters, and made a commitment to yourself that you're going to listen to everything, and just really put yourself in your ears, it's a completely different world. For me, it's deeply moving and emotional to do these walks, for myself. Also, a lot of the responses that people have are quite intense.
What are you most looking forward to, on this walk?
I am so intrigued by aspen trees.
We're going up to Nose Hill, for the walk and there are these groups of trees. They're actually clones. That sounds kind of scary and alienating. So they are more than siblings. They're not one tree, they are a group of trees, but they literally share a root network. So they're not just communicating through mycorrhizal networks, they are joined together underground. I find them really, really interesting. I've gone up there and spent time in those little copses or groups of aspen trees. When I'm inside of one, I feel like I'm inside of a living being. There's a presence to them. I find it to be a really, really, special environment. I can't I can't quite articulate why. But I think it's going to be really fun to do this walk and be in that environment.
I'm also looking forward to doing a walk with some folks from Calgary because that's not something we do often, and just to meet some people who are part of this interesting community around New Works Calgary and this whole soundwalk project, really excited for that.
Visit Showpass to register for “Kinship With Trees.”
Annie Martin’s Biography
Annie Martin's practice moves between audio installation, drawing, painting, textile, performance and video. Her work has been exhibited widely in Canada, and also internationally. She lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta, in the traditional lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, and is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Lethbridge.
Sandra Cowan’s Biography
Sandra Cowan is the Fine Arts librarian at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and is a visitor in the traditional territory of the Siksikaitsitapi. Her research is about walking as a research methodology for creative work. She also maintains a creative practice in photography, clay, and language, and is an avid pedestrian. Sandra's digital artist's book Pedestrian is here: www.sandracowan.com
