IX. Interview with… Clementine Robertson, multidisciplinary artist and researcher
Clementine Robertson, Beetroot Dionysis, Edinburgh 2012. Photo: Mark Douglas Scott
With a presiding interest in the intersection of flora and fauna, the sensuality of the Earth, and the history of our (de)realisation thereof, Clementine Robertson's praxis — which covers everything from movement, performance, to textiles — is guided by her unending passion for ethnobotany. Robertson work as a multidisciplinary artist and research has seen her exhibit extensively in both her home country of Australia and abroad.
In conversation with The Empty Set below, which has been lightly edited and condensed, Robertson discusses visual art’s tenuous relationship to the environment, the importance of cultivating and protecting indigenous forms of knowledge and how we can all benefit from living through our inherent intractability to nature.
- Kwasu Tembo
Knowing you as long as I have, and having had the privilege of numerous private audiences with you about a host of topics – in Edinburgh and Harare – I wonder if you'd consider it a malapropism to claim that your relationship with Australia, both its land and people, is one of increasing retrogression? What is your relationship with Australia now? How has it changed? What drew you and draws you to it then and now? What of it has been lost and what, if anything, of it remains?
I have a very conflicted relationship with the land of my birth. Perhaps the immediate regression is overwhelmingly within the hands of our current political leaders and their short term thirst of capitalism, something that exists the world over. Another is the ongoing 19th-Century attitudes that continue to deny the true history and nature of this land as well as the voices and practices of the traditional custodians, which keeps the country in a strange holding pattern and perpetuates an ever-growing divide in thinking and relation to being culturally of the place.
The island has been a contradiction from the moment it was forcefully settled by Europeans. Not unlike Africa, it is an ancient land with thousands of years of human history involving hundreds of different language groups and customs that retained a sacred intimacy and ongoing reciprocal relation with the land before colonial settlement. The disruption of these intricate cultural and ecological systems long maintained have led to extremes of flood, fire and plague and whilst there is a growing awareness within the peoples of Australia to its past, there is an equally proportioned space of denial, disproportionately carried by those with power.
Growing up here, the pervading electricity in the land cannot be denied. It can be felt within the synapses, it vibrates with an intense frequency. When I lived in Scotland I was comforted by the vastness of the sky and the landscape, not unlike here, but often lamented my physical distance from the sacred energy of the vast Pacific isle with its extraordinary plants, animals and peoples that can be found nowhere else. This land perpetuates my fascination with plants, people and performance. It will always be home. The indigenous custodians have been inspiringly resilient. I look forward to the day when they are our leaders, that their wisdoms of this place are carried long into the future as they held in the past.
I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with you twice: first during the ECA Costume Graduate Show and later on my final M.O.T.O EP “Always-Already” for PRRRRRRR Records. A recursive proclivity I've noticed is your relentless pursuit of a concerted, willful, and conscientious understanding and engagement with Earth, matter and the tactile: the metal in the soil, the soil in the blood, crownflower and leafblade, the admixture of root and stem.
What do you hold most dear with regard to these phenomena? Why and how do you feel that we as a species have worst misappropriated them? How do the contemporary art praxes you've seen continue to exacerbate the most egregious aspects of this disconnect?
For a moment Baz you were a dazzling 19th-Century eccentric who had travelled the seas to this Pacific island and lost your soul to its music, and I am honoured to have been part of your music creation!
The materials of earth have been engaged to make sense of and tell stories of our interconnection with the cosmos, physical and spiritual throughout time. Earth pigments were used to depict narrative on rocks, from our mystical origins to the practical methods of hunting; and painted onto our bodies to transform our physical appearance with purposes of aligning with the spirit realm. When the curtain closes on our individual performance on this Earthen stage, the flesh of our bodies decompose into nutritious matter to feed more life. And so it feels intuitive, innately sensual, perhaps very traditional to engage the earthen materials of life to communicate creatively.
Regarding misappropriation, a few years ago I visited an exhibition in a well revered contemporary institution for the arts focused on Trees. On the whole it was a fascinating collaboration between scientists, anthropologists, Indigenous knowledge holders and artists. But I was horrified to discover the inclusion of a sculpture of a tree made entirely from plastic as one of the main artworks. This was shown without any mention of fossil fuels nor evident intent to highlight the obvious nature of plastic being the opposite to the living, breathing arboreal organism, nor its destructive journey in our ecosystems. Instead there was a dismal accompanying text highlighting trees as symbols of peace and prosperity! Commercial 'contemporary art' at its worst, and worse that the plastic tree was positioned to be amidst a collection of real, living trees. As if the commercial Christmas that inflicts itself each year isn’t enough of an insidious blight of plastic trees apparently representing something magical and vital to humanity?
Clementine Robertson, Ex Luto, 2017. From ‘Weaving the landscape of plants’, Mekong Ganga Textile Museum
Like most, I watched the 2020 fires and the floods in Australia aghast. The lives lost, homes destroyed, the displacement of animal and human alike. It made me think of the couplet that inspired the title of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time”. What are your views of human-nature symbiosis across a range of ideas covered between say accelerationism and anarcho-primitivist antipodes? Should we fear nature's revenge, and if such a thing was to come wrathful over our city walls, devouring our city limits, how do you envision it?
Yes, the land here is screaming to be heard! For thousands of years the traditional custodians had maintained fire practices to manage the ecosystem. Many of the plants are fire dependent, meaning they only survive and germinate with fire. But the tactics of Europeans have been to avoid fire at all costs, allowing untouched areas of habitat to go unmanaged and amass vast amounts of fuel for super fires that quite literally explode with disastrous results. Integrating Indigenous-led knowledge systems and practices are imperative to the future survival of plants, animals and people alike.
Several years ago a local Tharawal Aunty impressed upon me the importance of moving to higher ground. She reminded me that Australia was once a series of islands and how the indigenous peoples had read the signs in the landscape in order to survive the vast geographical transitions over thousands of years. Shifting and dancing with the land is an intuitive, graceful and diplomatic practice. Indigenous peoples whose traditional lands are the grasslands long below sea level have lived on the borrowed territories of nations on higher ground for thousands of years. Today suburbia sprawls in wetland environments claimed for human purpose and the dammed rivers are destined to overflow as they make their way to the sea when the rains rush over poorly managed eroding soils. There is no wisdom in our contemporary systems, they lack the common and practical sense of symbiosis.
Recently I watched a documentary on Japan’s wall built to keep out the sea in the possible event of another tsunami. As the local fisherman and villages pointed out, they have no way of reading the ocean with the wall separating them. The indigenous peoples on the Andaman and Nicobar islands were safely on higher ground when the tsunami hit that ravaged the coasts of Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, as they had observed the signs and retained the wisdom of their ancestors through oral tradition.
I don’t fear Nature’s revenge, I fear humanity’s so called ‘progress’ far more, at the rate we are going Nature has every right to reap revenge on our accelerated destruction. I have always been obsessed with spotting the plants that take hold in the most unlikely of urban environments reminding us of our place within a vast living organism. Indigenous figs love taking root in the roofs and walls of city streets here and I take great pleasure in half squinting and thinking of the magical temples in Cambodia swallowed by vast snaking Kapok roots. I’m romantic, the horrific realities are already upon us!
What are some of the most interesting aspects of ethnobotany you've learned over the years? How do your ethnobotanical interests and art praxis intersect?
The symbiotic relations of plants and people are at the root of all existence. The intimacy of our interdependent history is an eternal dance. Every human creature depends on plants, plants have shaped and defined us for thousands of years. Each moment of our existence is entwined with the macro and micro functions of plant life. Each breath we take has been gifted by plants, the foods and medicines we consume to support our wellbeing, the fibrous clothes that cover us and carry memory often adorned with the colourful patterns both inspired and created with the alchemy of plant pigments, and vitally the spiritual teachings that plants impart defining our place within the vast cosmic organism. Separation from plants is merely illusion. The fabric of our existence, every aspect of it is permeated by plant power. The peoples who have retained their plant knowledge traditions carry a wealth of practical and existential comprehension.
Society values the economic potential of botany, generously represented by the few monoculture crops that feed us today. But it is the wealth of knowledge held by plants and people that is of true eternal value. At the root of all human and plant relations is a cosmic story. These narratives are sometimes encoded in geometric patterns transcribed through sung traditions in conjunction with the act of weaving plant materials. The Ikat is one example. In Cambodia the colours of the complex multicoloured geometric textile designs are informed entirely by the forests.
My own art practice is informed by timeworn traditions that both celebrate and engage plants, and the independent stories of the plants themselves having migrated and conquered the human species. I utilise plant matter to tell stories, be it in painting the intimate and otherworldly portrait of a single character or in an attempt to capture the vast and magical nature of our shared cosmos. I wish to tread lightly on the Earth as our ancestors once did when theatre was created from the landscape and related the magical narratives of our interdependence.
Clementine Robertson, Oolithus, 2015
You recently shared a Michael Pollan quote from a Georgina Reid text with me: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death”. What are three of the most sensual, sublime, and startling things about our relationship with nature that we're losing or have already lost? How, in your view, can we re-sensualize, re-wild in meaningful and realistic ways?
They certainly are, unless one is watching Peter Greenaway’s A Draughtmens Contract, or might have been a promiscuous 18th-Century visitor to one of the earliest tapis vert (green carpet) creations of Louis XIV in the Park of Versailles!
We are forcibly and consciously moving towards ever greater disconnection through the loss of principal rituals and nullification of the gifts we innately embody as humans of the natural world.
Sensual, our senses! Both metaphorically and literally! Our sense of smell was the most primal facet enabling us to interpret our environment. As we move further from the natural world we are overwhelmingly dependent on sight in the C21st and yet we are glued to technologies that damage our retina, rendering us blind without the aid of further technologies. As our acoustic comprehension transitions from the biodiverse frequencies that create the soundscape of a complex natural environment to those jarring industrial sounds that reap havoc with our nervous systems. There are extraordinary studies of Whales and their use of sound to communicate below water. The sensitive nuances of communication are lost in the network of interfering barbarous technological frequencies rendering the Whales helpless in their own habitat.
Sublime is possibly the instinct, the mastery of the senses and synapses. The essence of ‘feeling’ and of ‘knowing’.
We are creatures with multiple elastic limbs that synchronise when dancing barefoot in the land and whose voices like those of the Nightingale or Lyrebird are capable of creating a vast array of exquisite sounds! The communal ritual of singing and dancing appears to be disappearing along with our ecosystems. The joy, spiritus, the bliss of life is being replaced with hard edges.
Startling are the stars! And with increasing light pollution and technological interference we are losing them! The stars throughout time have acted as reference points, enabling us to navigate our positions, our journeys and our dreaming within the vast cosmic system.
This is very broad as everyone's situation is no doubt different. But I would recommend falling asleep under a tree and letting it speak; working the earth and savouring the smell, the taste and its embrace. To run into the rain, not away from it and dance: to let the sun kiss your skin when it appears and get lost staring into a fire/allow yourself to be hypnotised by a fire. To be curious and take responsibility for what one consumes, and explore endlessly. Listening to and learning from the Indigenous peoples of the world, their stories, their practices and processes are the only true guidance for being meaningful and realistic about nature, apart from nature itself with continual observation and interaction.
We must change the overwhelming perspective towards nature, to revere and respect nature, see ourselves as part of nature, not separate. To spiritually, emotionally and physically engage with a reciprocal alignment.
You've often spoken of a great Calm that comes rumbling to, around, and within you from the Earth. What are your views on the (dis)equilibrium between politics and spirit that serve to blunt and be-night it?
To continue from the sublimity and startling nature of the relationship between earth and the galaxies, the obsession with the concept of future progress taking us to space is a very literal example of this disequilibrium. Exploration of the galaxies to better understand our place within the universe is part of a timeless existential quest. However to abuse the intricate balances of space for greed and gain is abhorrent. The concept of moving to a planet B because we cannot take responsibility for the paradise we have been gifted. To view ‘progress’ as what is merely a continuation of the destructive practices of colonisation and commercialisation undertaken here on earth is surely the greatest depravity of the soul at a time when we are only just beginning to comprehend the innate wonders of earth.
The leaders of today have no vision of the future. They are a stand-up tragedy devouring and sanitising the wealth of creation for the creation only of immediate monetary gain and power. There is an infinite silence, a calm, in the eye of a storm, but politics is a noise to fill an overgrowing void of loss.
You recently drew my attention to a now cancelled so-called performance art piece titled “We Want Your Blood” that tried hard to couch itself firmly within the remit of radical political art. How do you find contemporary art praxes to be exploitative of both plants and people? What to you represents radical artistic praxis in this our epoch of late digital capitalism?
Clementine Robertson, Sydney, 2016 at The Yellow House Art Gallery
The pitfalls of politics and art! The only positive thing I have to say about this situation is that in laying bare the depravity within institutions through such extraordinary circumstances, they are obliged to face the music. There is a tide of reckoning taking place.
Perhaps the true radical tide of today is the very opposite: the literal reclamation of knowledges and processes lost and disappearing; the reclamation of the very ‘human’. I started thinking about Nijinski and the Ballet Russe. It's just over one hundred years ago, and yet if we were to see Nijinski perform his dance of the Fawn today I can imagine it to still be shocking to many, and yet the expression of ecstasy is a fundamental nature of being human.
There is no doubt that technology when used in a sensitive manner is able to convey things we sense but do not see nor comprehend with the naked eye or touch. The contemporary artist Gabriela Reyes Fuchs captures the mesmerising microscopic nebulae in ashes through photography revealing galaxies in our dust. The use of technology can be intelligently radical when used with such a sense of wonder! In Sydney there is an Indigenous team of virtual reality creatives who reconstruct the landscapes of pre colonial settlement to culturally engage their audience via technological immersion. This exquisite tool conveys hidden truths in a literal and poignant manner that is far more political, radical and real than a stranger from another country requesting the blood of First Nations people!
Everytime I think of you and your work, I think of Swamp Thing. I'm no expert. Despite my dilettantish knowledge of the Saga, I do know that in the comics, various elementals of the DC Omniverse have corresponding realms and organising structures. For example, plant elementals communicate with an elemental force called the Green, which in turn connects all forms of plant life on Earth. While the Green is inhabited by the collective minds of the Parliament of Trees, it is contrasted and related to other realms, dimensions and forces of nature. The Red, for example, which is connected to all animal life and is overseen by the Parliament of Limbs. I think of your work as somewhere between the Green and the Red, the Tree and the Limb, the bark and the skin. Is this a fair assessment?
I have yet to read Swamp Thing but it sounds fascinating. I recently listened to a neuroscientist describing our bodies as the plants and our brains the flowers, it was a timeless and enchanting assessment. Perhaps one of the mistakes we make is in separating and categorising that which is green and that which is red as the co-existence and communication is viscerally one interdependent body. Seeing trees as flesh could change a lot of thinking for the better.
What is our dis-relationship with the Green as children of both the Green and the Red? What do you make of the violence of the Red over and against the Green?
As pre-conditioned children, comprehending the innate living in all matter is instinctual, there are no lines between red and green. The violence of the flesh towards the green is a very colonial and capitalist scheme, children are corrupted as they struggle to find their way in these man-made systems as adults. The disease of disconnection is great. I hope we remember that we are children in a paradisiacal paradigm. There is no justification for the rape of earth and cosmos, and in doing so we are only robbing ourselves of life.
Swamp Thing Meets the Sun, by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben
What is the status of the Green and the Red in contemporary art? How are both co-opted by capitalism in themselves, as well as their artistic manifestations?
The economic systems must change to meet ecological ones which means that incessant growth is simply not an option. Art is considered an industry, not a necessity within the capitalist paradigm. Happily more and more artists, scientists and knowledge holders are collaborating to tell their stories. More often than not these are both driven and made possible by privately-led institutions aiming to do what the larger ones are not. Supporting intuitive cross pollination of knowledge is the way of the future.
Whenever we speak, I always mean to but forget to describe the Spore Drive and the Mycelial Network in Star Trek: Discovery. Both always make me think about the relationship between plants, the ancient, the futuristic, and connectivity itself more broadly. What are your views on this relationship?
I believe there is a time-full and eternal interrelationship between all elements of the cosmos with an intricate balance. Just to observe our planet and its relationship with the moon, or a bee engaged in the act of pollination is enough. I have no doubt that all matter communicates, plant and mineral throughout the cosmic system, it’s perhaps just us humans who have forgotten the language. Ancient cultures infer to this relationship through their songs, weavings and ritual practices. Plant medicines have enabled shamans to connect and communicate across vast distances of time and place. The technologies are within us as chemical compounds, our gut microbes like those of fungi in a forest are networks of intelligence on which the health of the system depends.
The indigenous calendar in Australia encompasses thousands of years of intelligence whose language is ever present, and the readings of the star and earth relations are recorded by disparate cultures through sacred patterns. We are ever present within this vast cosmos in life and death, and if we were to focus on synchronising with its frequencies and its true pulse we might forget about the concepts we tend to project of past, present and futurism. We, the Earth we inhabit are more innately magical than our current systems allow. I believe it is our responsibility as humans to live intelligently and harmoniously within the systems gifted to us by the cosmos, and to celebrate them!
