2022 Sitka Residency Artist Highlight: Jordan DeLawder
Clearing
What happens when the landscape is damaged beyond recognition; when a forest is reduced to stumps and ash? Ecological philosopher David Abram describes the natural environment as a living matrix of meaning (1), a field of experience where we contextualize our lives amongst other beings. In the wake of extraction, the task of deriving meaning from the earth becomes less certain and requires that we experiment with new ways of noticing. As disturbed sites continue to proliferate under global capitalist regimes, it is imperative to find ways to love what is left, as a way to make it livable again.
Last October, I spent a month at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, where I was given time and space to explore the diverse environs of the Central Oregon coastline. Although I had access to protected swathes of old-growth forest, estuaries, and beaches, I was drawn to working with disturbed logging sites to the east of Highway 101. This patchwork of clear-cuts was an ideal landscape to think about beauty and livability in the wake of extraction, while confronting the myriad of feelings that arise when this destruction is made visible—grief, outrage, freedom, possibility. I visited these sites day after day and noticed assemblages of human artifacts and natural materials, new and entangled lifeways emerging from the wreckage.
Drawing from Anna Tsing’s concept of “salvage” (2) as an economic process of accumulating wealth from living systems, I tried to salvage beauty, rather than commodities, from these industrial forests. Using the camera as an invitation, I experimented with relational methods—such as arrangement, sculpture, performance, foraging, writing, and conversing—as means of imagining and enacting a livable future on damaged earth. In these photographs, the clear-cut is re-contextualized as a site of creation and recuperation, an unlikely haven found through sustained presence and attention.
Jordan DeLawder is an environmental artist and conservationist. They use photography and printmaking to engage with ecological change, devotional practices, and queer futurity. DeLawder holds a BS in environmental engineering from Tufts University with a minor in studio art. They live and practice in Portland, Oregon.
(1). David Abram, “In the Landscape of Language” in The Spell of the Sensuous (New York, Pantheon Books, 1996), 178.
(2). Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Working the Edge” in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015), 63.