Chapter 6 The Ego - Eco Binary Through Ceramic Art
Ceramic Sculpture
One way to engage the dualistic notion of anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism creatively is to articulate it through materiality instead of words. A piece of ceramic sculpture, titled Reversal (2020) may fulfil this purpose.
I was drawn to a statement in the critical reflection article at the end of chapter one – Marginal Worlds: ‘The natural world as a passive entity in the background of the lives of humans, who occupy the foreground and cater to the survival and destruction of the anthropocentric perception of the natural.’ But in a Marxist act of defiance, the natural world is now fighting back with ‘eco-microaggressions’ to overturn the egocentric design of man.
In Reversal, this human-nature binary is depicted along the uneven ontology of ego vs. eco, active vs. passive, and the big vs. the small. The tawny anthropocentric degenerative mass still looms large, but it has now been relegated to the back. In contrast, the emerald regenerative greenshoot is now in the fore. Despite its small size, it embodies the potential to grow; like Nike itself, to swoosh, to fly and to survive. On the other hand, anthropocentrism is on the decline, it's mass vaporising along the y-axis as time marches along the x-axis, its surface scarred, its scope narrower, its trajectory assumes a downward gaze.The ontological table has now turned in nature's favour.
This optimistic eco-generative worldview has begun to materialise, big and small, in the Transition of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge; the Re-Wilding of Europe; the planting of trees on the sidewalks of Redfern.
In The Ecological Thought, Tim Morton stresses the centrality of art in ecology – Art manifested to us how to think ecologically – and argues that ecology is not just about global warming and green energy, but also about "love, loss, despair and compassion ... space and time ... delight, beauty, ugliness, disgust, irony and pain ... race, class, and gender ... paradoxes of subjectivity ... coexistence." Reversal seems to embody all these qualities; as well as sexuality which is symbolised by the red dot, the fulcrum of "interconnectedness."