Arts in the Watershed | Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative

FOSC: Can you tell us a little about your art practice and the mediums you like to explore?

Ariel: I am an artist, herbalist, and educator and I also have extensive professional experience working in gardening, and landscaping for food, medicine, as well native/drought tolerant plantings. I am a multidisciplinary artist working through visual storytelling and social/ecological/material interventions. I connect personal shatterings and mendings to collective and historical events and processes. This manifests as experimental narrative comic books and tapestries populated by animal and spiritual critters, haunting visitations, landscapes, psychological domestic interiors and playful expressions of nonlinear time. As well as through experiments in open-source landscape art projects like the Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative, all of which seek to work in opposition to the alienation processes inherent in the capitalist project. You can see more about my work at arielcooper.net

Emma: Hi! I am an artist and educator. I have worked for over a decade at the intersection of arts education and community-based supportive services across diverse communities in the Bay Area. 

In my personal art practice, I nurture, gather and refine materials, especially pigments and fiber, from the immediate world around me for use in my work. These processes create a point of contact for me to explore my relationship to and sense of belonging within the ‘more-than-human’ world. I gather materials within this urban environment and further afield, grow plant materials in gardens and pull materials from the waste stream. My work includes painting, book arts, handmade paper, papercut and enameling on steel and copper. You can view some of my work at emmafentonmiller.com 

FOSC: What is your connection to the Sausal Creek watershed?

Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative: We are both white women of settler descent that have lived along Sausal Creek for many years and have been drawn to the green spaces, especially Dimond Canyon Trail, as a crucial presence in our neighborhoods. On an ecological level we know that life in this area is deeply shaped by and dependent on this watershed. On an emotional level we both just love the creek so much! We are so lucky to have Sausal Creek in our lives. 

This project we are working on, and that we are going to be talking about in these interview questions is very much inspired by the examples of the deeply reciprocal land stewardship practices of indigenous and traditional communities around the world. We are indebted to their leadership and traditional ecological knowledge, particularly here in California.

FOSC: What inspired the Sausal Creek Ivy League (SCIL) project, and what drew you to basketry in particular?

Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative: We see the projects that we do as the Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative as creative experiments in building and deepening our relationships with the creek and all life there including with other humans. You could also say we wanted to experiment with becoming more embedded in our ecology. In the art world people are often doing things that “represent” or comment on dynamics or relationships in society. Another way to work is for the art practice and experiments to be the relationship, or to be practical interventions. Sausal Creek Ivy League (SCIL) is our first experiment in engaging in one of these practical interventions. We hope that by cultivating a culture of direct, creative interaction with the ivy we can help keep this thriving plant in check while also acknowledging and respecting the place it holds in our disturbed environment. 

Basketry is one way that humans have tied their needs and creativity to their ecology. On the one hand you can make a basket by just buying materials from a store. Those materials have been grown, managed, processed and prepared for commerce so that the artist and craftsperson can access them without a direct relationship. This complex industry largely represents underpaid labor and exploitative land practices happening in other parts of the world. Through collecting ivy for baskets, we want to tie our creative practice to the abundance and the well-being of the land we live with. As we pull the ivy to create baskets we notice our impact on the land. We think about what happens as spaces on the vine-covered hillsides open up. Our creative process becomes a mutually beneficial part of the ecological process as has often been the case for humans since time immemorial.

FOSC: How does this project connect with themes of ecology, healing, or community?

Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative: As destructive as humans can be to their natural environment we believe that humans can be equally as beneficial. Humans are a cultural animal, and many human communities have and still do exist within their ecologies as keystone species through cultural practices of reciprocity.  We learn and survive through passing practices and ideas to each other. As artists we are culture makers and holders. We are interested in experimenting with creating opportunities for cultural practices to emerge or resurface that can move us toward human keystone behaviors. 

This has led us to the idea of the commons. The commons is a space where people get the things they need outside of the market economy. And often in terms of land commons, there are shared cultural practices that ensure the land remains abundant, not only for humans, but also for their plant and animal kin. We all do better when we all do better. 

Creating a basket out of an overabundant non-native species like English Ivy meets our need to have access to abundant creative materials and our need to feel closer to the land we live with. It also begins to make space in the watershed for plant successions within a disturbed landscape. In the places that we have harvested for our baskets, there are now some open spaces with no ivy and we need to ask ourselves, what need was ivy meeting in those spaces that we need to consider as we think about what to plant next? How can those plants fill the niche of ivy and also keep humans coming back in a beneficial way by visiting that space, continuing to interact meaningfully and creatively with the ivy and also with the plants that are replacing the ivy? 

FOSC: What can visitors look forward to seeing or experiencing from you at the plant sale?

Sausal Creek Artist Collaborative: We plan to show up with a bunch of baskets people can see and touch to maybe get inspired to start harvesting ivy and making your own baskets or other projects!! 

We’ll have information about our collaborative sausalcreekarts.org, some books that we have been inspired by and info about how to get involved. We’ll also have a mini demonstration going on making cordage with wild nettle fiber! Come by to say hello!