The Art of Relationship: In Conversation with Lydia Cheshewalla
(Part II)

Katherine Kassouf Cummings:

For your latest installation, Before Dreams Are the Last Place We Find You, you were here at Humans & Nature Farm for just ten days, getting to know the place and making art. Can you tell us about the relatives you worked with to produce these pieces, and also anything about the process of making these works?

Lydia Cheshewalla:

Yes, so I definitely brought in maple samaras from home, because to me, they’re my guide. This might actually be the last year I have with them, because if we take my tree down, it won’t produce anymore. And so that felt really so poignant and necessary to honor that they’re here right now but might not be again. And honestly, when I was on the land at Center for Humans & Nature, I was experiencing a feeling of “Oh, I’m brand new.” This land clearly doesn’t know me and doesn’t respond to me the way it responds to y’all, because I saw Anja walk through the woods, and that is not how the woods were with me.

And so I think mostly I drifted to what was most familiar to me, to the beings that I do already have relationship with. So that’s the coneflowers, that’s the rattlesnake master—those are what I drew in from y’all’s land. I drew in some of the shagbark hickory hulls because I also know them, and the walnuts and the oaks from the Brushwood Center. So I worked with those because I’ve also worked with sugar maple before and Norway maple. And then I brought in the beech tree because it grows right up at the door of Brushwood.

I gathered wild bergamot from Brushwood because none of it at the Center for Humans & Nature’s land was quite ready yet. And that was interesting to see that just twenty minutes south it’s different from twenty minutes north. You must wait. And there was some that had gone already to seed, because of powdery mildew. I want to be cautious about what I am sometimes bringing in—there is a processing that has to happen. I don’t want to introduce fungal diseases to other ecoregions. For example, something I found at Brushwood is that the false indigo there had weevils, so I knew the seeds had to get processed there. I couldn’t bring weevils to the Center for Humans & Nature because I saw in the pods that I gathered at your land that y’all don’t have weevils. Or for the silver maple samaras that I bring from home, I’ll burn them because they aren’t from here, in the native sense. They aren’t good for the environment. I don’t want to grow another silver maple in my yard because they damaged the foundation of my house and broke apart my sewer line, so I won’t be having them living with me that way again.

All the plant allies I’ve worked with before were easier to come into, to be able to see, OK, this land is issuing a kind of refusal. We’ve got a forest on this property that probably needs a bit of chainsaw. It’s without understory, probably because of an Army Corps plan, way back in the day when they would do that to farmers with partial cropland. You can feel the difference between the soil compaction when you’re walking between the area that was cropped and that wasn’t because the land did not allow it to become that.

Marshes are interesting to me because I think have marshy ancestry, but deep in there I’m a prairie person, because that is the more recent history that I can access. The rattlesnake master is down there and was like, Let’s go. But there were a lot of things I couldn’t recognize, and if I don’t recognize something, maybe it doesn’t get drawn in because we don’t know each other well enough. There are some things that I see that I don’t know and I’m like, Oh, you want to be known, so I’m going to learn who you are right now and pull you in. The beech tree, for example. When a tree has dumped all its seed right in front of you, you know, OK, received.

I’ve worked a little with stone in my installations, but I have found that rocks are the most resistant to coming into the gallery that way. And I think it is that oldness—they see us all the time, and they’re like, Your building is made of me. I don’t know what it is. I can’t really presume because I’m not one. I don’t speak that language. I’m a human, and we’re only coming into shared language.

But this is the first time I felt like rocks were willing to be part of the installation—and as a dynamic yes, not just a “sure.” I think that’s because I gathered rocks from the cropland, and it seemed like they were just so ready to get out of there. They were stuck deep and were trying to come to the surface, but the soil was hard. I had to not just dig them out, but knife them out. And that was also interesting to me, because there is this thing about gathering where you do have to use a clipper sometimes. I don’t feel bad about it if everything I’m clipping is fully dead. When the plants die off and the heads fall off, you can clip them. That is a practice of horticulture and ecology and garden caretaking. I only take what feels reasonable.

In the installation, a lot of the kin I’ve worked with already, had those relationships, and so I found them again. The stones were interesting to me because of that dynamic of Get us out of the crop field. We’ve been in the crop field for forever. We’ll come be in this installation. We’ll come to this other space. I also was realizing in this installation, with maple samaras as my way in, how much I lean on them for the heavy lifting of the conversation. I lean on them a lot for my pathway in. There are certain things like the samaras that I do travel with and that I feel come from earlier stages of gathering, like I’ve actually been living with them for a long time. The sensation I get when I’m with them is that they aren’t as fervent about going anywhere. We’ve made home together, and they are willing to continue showing up for the work. When I’m pulling from, say, the Center for Humans & Nature or from Brushwood, it’s a different relationship: Those things want to go back. They’re like, Cool, we’ll come in and also we’ll go back.

So there are stages of return. There’s the immediate return of those who want to immediately return, and those who are along for the ride—those who actually aren’t good for their environment can’t really go back. They go back in another form, through the process of fire, which is also a transformation and a return because they aren’t put into a landfill where they can’t decompose. They’re put back into the energy exchange of all existence. And so that’s how I was thinking about the work for this show: being on this land that was issuing refusals, and being patient and waiting, and also not being disappointed that new things didn’t necessarily want to work with me but respecting that we’re new together.

When I was coming up with the name for the exhibition, I was really thinking about futurity, not wanting to be too heavy-handed about the fact that things are crucial right now, that we are in the midst of climate shifts impacting people in different ways at different timescales. A few years ago I read somebody who was writing on nostalgia and ecological grief. They were saying that we also need to keep room for the joy, because there are people going through climate change that looks like extended fall, better weather for longer. So we can allow ourselves in those moments to celebrate what is good or what feels good, even if we know it’s part of something that might not be. We can continue to bring joy in so that things don’t become too heavy, so we don’t burn out or cease looking because something’s too hard to look at.

And so I was thinking about the futurity of what I’m hoping for the future. What I’m hoping for the future is that everyone I love is here. I don’t want us to go anywhere. There’s a bug guy who was saying that part of his practice as an entomologist is waking up every morning and saying to himself, Someone is missing. And then he honors that. He honors the fact that an insect had been here just before. The rate at which we’re losing insects is very fast. We’re losing insects faster than anything else.

Insects are little. We overlook them. We overlook a lot of beings that are little. We don’t see them because they’re insects. We don’t see that we’re losing them in the same way that we might see that we’re losing trees or glaciers.

It’s a depressing ritual to wake up and know that someone’s missing and to sit with and honor the fact that they’re no longer with us. I don’t know that I could have that practice because it seems so sorrowful. It’s not where my heart can be focused to do this work, even though it’s an important acknowledgment. I was thinking about this continuance that I’m hoping for and that right now it hasn’t really completely happened. We are in the before times still: before dreams are the last place we can find these beings. They’re still with us.

What does that mean as far as responsibility? How do we keep them out of being just in dream space? How do we keep them out of being just history books? How do we keep them from becoming sequestered to natural history museum’s drawers that nobody opens? How do we get them to go and who do we have to become so that they can come with us? And that makes me think about Tanaya Winder, an indigenous poet. She has this poem where she’s talking about language and relearning indigenous language and the word for “Where are you going?” That maybe that’s not the most important question. Maybe instead it’s learning to say, “I’m coming with you.”