Voyage to Resiliency
Voyage to Resiliency
Voyage to Resiliency
Artist Courtney M. Leonard. Photo by Mark Poucher.
Take hands. Grasp helm. We are carriers utilizing our skills from genetic memory. A codex of medicine. An existence of craft and as craft.
In times of silence, of paused reprieve, we center ourselves, afford time to breathe, take in sips more than gulps, and swallow the calm of embodied desires. To flourish, we must nurture the landscapes that honor us. A gift for a gift. For it is from these environments that we harvest our existence.
Craft is a voyage bound by memory and ritual. Our cerebral relations extend as fibers soaking the essence of skills set before us. Swabbing a deck of salted preservation, each sail we set merely cups the bellowing winds of intentions amidst a vast and open ocean.
How often do we produce? How often do we pause? Observe our daily intake? Our import of ideas? Our export of material relation? And for whom do we construct the labor?
We seek craft to heal. To communicate. To relate.
As the world came to a time of stillness during the pandemic, ceasing to travel and shifting to virtual relations, our calmness lessened our extraction of materials. In return this pause, this calm before the return of a creative storm, opened a shift of opportunities to think locally; to exist within the atmosphere of mindfulness; and to acknowledge our reduced footprints on or off deck. When docked on an island of solitude, we sat with our thoughts, our worries, our resiliency, and developed a resourcefulness of creative resolve.
Some shifted to learning to harvest closer to home so as to teach themselves, or others, that resilience is not dependent on the import and export of goods, but on an ability to walk, to relate to the cultural landscape we exist within, to be present, to harvest, and to exert energy through all of the layers of processing material relation.
Relationality is not a hindrance. Appreciate these pauses. Bear witness to the depths of possibilities.
Weaving a record in and out of time is such an expansive endeavor. A cordage extended and rooted from the elements of our emergence. A woven ancestor. A recognition of time. Often forgetting our tangible and collective energy.
Being accessible to one another may have expanded in a digital age of virtual video workshops and lectures and meetings, but as those times have reduced, we remain in our secular settings. Remaining within the home may have taken on a newer meaning however we define it. And by doing so we witnessed moments of observations that at times shifted our daily patterns.
Will we continue to carry the awareness to be still? To be calm? To be present? And to be mindful that for every action . . . there is an opposite and equal reaction? Will the healing we seek with our relation and creation of craft continue to be a living resource? Can we be responsible and mindful stewards of these resources?
Those who know water in all of its truths know balance. The balance that we cannot exist without water. That we are water. That just as water can be calming and healing, it can also be chaotic and destructive. Are these the same truths for craft? The same balance? With or without permission, we extract. From birth we begin consuming. A bold gesture indeed. To flow from seed, to be sown. We ground ourselves with ambition and flourish in the resiliency of knowing that we are not alone. That the collective essence of our existence within each creative action is a ritual practice, a record of resiliency. What will they hold for the generations that carry them?
courtneymleonard.com | @courtneymleonardart
Leonard's water vessels in BREACH: Logbook 17 “Walking Cochiti Dam | The Return” in Cochiti Pueblo Territory, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of the artist.
For BREACH: Logbook 14 “Archetype,” Leonard wove bound local saplings into a whale tail breaching off Ship Harbour, Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaq Territory, holding space for what’s above and what’s below, and for interspecies relationship. Photo by Courtney M. Leonard.
