SESSION: Co-creation: Human and non-human making processes and their environmental entanglements

This panel offers a geographically and chronologically broad, interdisciplinary framework for re-evaluating human and so-called non-human interactions and their environmental implications in the creative process. Informed by recent work by scholars including GiovanniAloi, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sugata Ray, and Merlin Sheldrake, it asks whether we can interrogate the beginning of the creative process before the intervention of the human and still acknowledge the significance of the hand, and what implications this might have for art, craft and design history.

There are many epistemic systems that grant personhood to any entity: from mountains, seas, plants, and rocks, to animals and their “gifts”, but art history has long been dominated by a preoccupation with individual, exclusively human authorship. What happens when we do away with human-centred categories and think of natural materials and forces not as mute or inanimate, but instead as dynamic agents—co-makers—in mutually transformative processes with wider environmental entanglements? This multidisciplinary panel presents papers on multispecies making, craft and its environmental entanglements and on the fusion of human and natural manufacture.

Session Convenors:

Marta Ajmar, University of Warwick

Christine Guth, Independent Scholar, formerly V&A/RCA History of Design

Speakers:

Nina Amstutz, University of Oregon

Bowerbirds and the Co-Creative Origins of Art

My talk looks to the mating displays of bowerbirds to question the assumption that creative expression belongs to humans alone and to explore what a multispecies approach to art might look like in practice. Bowerbirds have evolved a set of cultural practices that approach the fine arts: they build structures out of sticks, adorn them with decorative objects, and perform mating displays of song and dance. These displays are inherently co-creative, in that the birds’ decorations – feathers, flowers, fruits, and, most recently, plastics – co-evolve with the aesthetic tastes of the other species that inhabit their environment, including humans. In evolutionary biology, these displays are largely explained in terms of their reproductive function, rather than as products of an aesthetically driven form of expression. My talk historicizes the idea of art as a uniquely human creation by examining how bowerbird displays have been understood across cultures, disciplines, and time. I principally focus on Indigenous stories and cultural practices surrounding the bowerbird in Papua New Guinea, including a celebratory dance and traditional ecological knowledge, based on oral history interviews I conducted with elders. Several elders explained that their ancestors learned to dance, compose songs, and decorate directly from the bowerbird, which signals an idea of art as a co-creative and multispecies enterprise. My talk explores how these traditions perform a knowledge of species relations that connects human creative activity to the wider community of life, offering a productive alternative to the analytical frameworks and institutions that have defined art in the West.

Charlotte Linton, University of Oxford

Ecologies of Textile Production: Dynamic Co-Creation in Amami Ōshima’s Natural Dyeing Practices

Using as its case study a natural dyeing workshop in Amami Ōshima, Japan, this paper supports the concept of dynamic co-creation within ecologies of textile production. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper focuses on dorozome (mud-dyeing), a labour-intensive process that enables craftspeople to produce colours on textiles ranging from pink to brown, and most famously dyeing the yarn of the Amamian kimono cloth Oshima tsumugi black. Craftspeople rely on local materials and natural resources to produce these colours, most prominently the Yeddo Hawthorn tree, mud that is high in iron, and plentifulspring water. Amami is a UNESCO World Natural Heritage site, meaning its craftspeople work alongside and provide habitat for endangered species, while their work and materials are impacted by the distinctive climate experienced on the subtropical island.

This panel highlights how art history has been preoccupied with ‘exclusively human authorship’. As a counterpoint, looking to anthropological engagements with creativity, and particularly the recent multispecies turn, scholars have recognised the roles that nonhumans play in the creative process. This turn has often looked towards indigenous communities’ relationships to the non-human world; similarly, I argue, the concept of co-creation has widely been accepted within traditional craft-making communities in Japan, where animism is embedded in local cosmologies and craftspeople less alienated from material origins. This paper seeks to acknowledge, however, that the romanticisation of non-Western perspectives omits complex realities – despite the non-human being respected as essential to creative practice in Japan, concomitant caring responsibilities are not always fulfilled.

Matthew Martin, University of Melbourne

Where Corals Lie: Carlo Ginori’s Porcelains for the Ocean Floor

For centuries, porcelain was known in Europe only as a luxury material imported from Asia whose method of fabrication was completely unknown. There was wild speculation about its material nature and the mode of its manufacture. Many such speculations sought to understand porcelain in terms of natural forces at work in the mineral world, and often a link was drawn between porcelain, shells and coral. The genesis of these marine materials was still only incompletely understood in the eighteenth century, and many natural philosophers considered them examples of stones that grew, connecting them with ideas about the fertility of the mineral realm.

This paper will explore how these ideas must stand in the background of a series of very unusual porcelain sculptures produced by the Italian natural philosopher and experimentalist Marchese Carlo Ginori at his Doccia porcelain factory in Sesto Fiorentino in the 1750s. These porcelains were designed to sit on the sea floor, marking the boundaries of coral farms in the Tyrrhenian sea. The sculptural groups incorporate putti, cartouches with inscriptions, but also porcelain models of coral branches. The surviving examples make it clear that the intention was also for natural corals to grow on the submerged porcelain bases, resulting in objects that were a fusion of human and natural manufacture. With clear connections to Kunstkammer objects incorporating corals, the resulting porcelain sculptures provide insights into the longevity of much earlier ideas about the fertility of the mineral world and the creative powers of nature in the eighteenth century.

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Roundtable

Ayisha Abraham, University of Warwick

Susan S. Bean, Independent Scholar, formerly Peabody Essex Museum

Ludovic Coupaye, University College London