Mary Newell

Scoping the Haze with Rarely Ravens  

June 7, 2023

I woke to the smell of burning wood, pungent enough that I called my neighbor, who smelled it too. Failing to locate a house in flames or smoke from chimney or nearby woods, we checked the news. It was forest fire smog wind-blasted from Nova Scotia, 987 miles northeast. Here, snuggled amid the Hudson Highlands, the haze is pervious, but a lurid orange sun smudges trees with neon streaks.

We retreat inside.

Headline summaries: 

•   Over 400 wildfires smolder in eastern Canada, with 10,000 acres burned. 

•   Smoke wafts south, carrying toxic nanoparticles.

• Air pollution in NYC (57 miles south) is hazardous: Air Quality Index reaches 405 at peak, settles into 183, the worst of any major city

June 9, 2023

This morning, a conspiracy of ravens surged from their woods,

         a largess of state land suited to their stature

One flapped to the center black oak

through the shared air

                  just clearing from the fire-smog

                             blown down from Nova Scotia

                  croaked news stridently

then another

tumulted in

After discordant dialogue, companions joined,

         brandishing black cloaks across the opening                         

                  congealed into the oak

                           tree corvid-mobbed

                           raven-shrouded

a hoot a squawk-uproar competition 

What were they conspiring?

                                                        perhaps     

                                               just to survive

                                      these altered airflows.

Raucous ravens, takers,

an unkindess to ear

a treachery to wolves, whose carrion they “share.”

to other nesting birds, a nest-despoiler.

Who could argue with the largest perching bird,

a rheumy songbird, but cunning

New York locals, these avians don’t know Nova Scotia,

rarely gather in back yards, but claimed the space

to canvass the air, kenning it passable

for a hunting excursion

                           trickster alert!

                           a sudden swoop, black flashes cross the sky

                           great birds swift in rave

         surfing wind drifts

                  over tall pines and oaks

                                             downhill toward the Hudson,

                                                                    targeting nurture

Here, sound turbulence abated,

the oak restored to calm abiding

awaiting next conspiracy.

so much depends on wind flow,

so much

on

what the wind carries.

*

Postscript

  Tips for identifying common ravens:

• Large size, near that of a Red-tailed Hawk

• Heavy bill

• Shaggy throat when viewed at close range

• Long, slightly pointed wings in flight

• Fairly long wedge-shaped tail

• Frequently seen soaring on flat wings; occasionally tumbles in the air

• Often makes deep, croaking or scratchy, burbling calls

Checklist, all checked, while trying to pry up the window screen so I could video;

         the only recorded sounds: the window sash, my fruitless efforting

 ___

Note: words in italics are monikers for groups of ravens

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen

Feminism, Freud, & Mother Earth

—A Tribute to Conceptual Artist Jane McAdam Freud (February 1958-August 2022)

One year after delivering my daughter, born to a nearly 43-year-old mother in the wake of Covid-19, I lost a dear friend and legendary artist, who took her final breath. During one of my final conversations with Jane McAdam Freud, we spoke endlessly about motherhood, my pregnancy during the pandemic, and the role of artistic creation during those dark days.

I met Jane 15 years ago through my mother, a psychoanalyst, in New York City and we became kindred spirits. Like me, Jane was a full-time stepmother to two young boys, and she shared my sensitivity to the world around us. And as with her famous family, Jane was intrigued by human beings while at the same time respecting nonhuman and nonliving creation as sacred.     

Jane happens to be the great-granddaughter of psychoanalysis founder Sigmund and daughter of esteemed painter, Lucian. Although she respected her famous forefathers for their contributions to psychology, literature, and the arts, Jane was also a fierce feminist who encouraged women to “paddle their own canoe,” which her mother, Catherine McAdam, had empowered her to do.  Moreover, Jane was a formidable conceptual and multimedia artist in her own right, and through her brilliant work contributed to the betterment of humanity and the environment. 

Jane Freud’s paintings and sculptures speak powerfully to the world, both human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, animate and inanimate, alive and dead. In 2008, she examined those binaries in her video “Dead or Alive,” which I had the pleasure of viewing recently in person at the Freud Museum in Pribor, the Czech Republic, her great grandfather’s birthplace. Set to Henri Purcell’s musical masterpiece “Sound the Trumpet,” Jane’s video is a compilation of images, mainly historical sculptures of human heads and death masks, provoking us to examine the fluid boundary human life and death. You can watch this video here:

Around the time that Jane left this world, I became interested in the ecocritical work of another Jane, named Jane Bennett, who argues in her groundbreaking book New Materialisms: A Political Ecology of Things that nonliving things have vitality as well as the living. Bennett’s project aims to “raise the status of the materiality” composing human and nonhuman life; doing so, she suggests, will leadsinevitably to more ethical ecological action (12). Furthermore, she also suggests that the interconnectedness of living and nonliving matter demands serious consideration to ensure a more sustainable planet.   

I began to think about Jane Freud’s sculptures and paintings as works of environmental art. How might I apply Bennett’s philosophy on the vitality of matter, metal, and other inanimate objects in reflecting upon Freud’s masterpieces? I turned to a 2017 interview with Jane McAdam Freud, (published on-line in a journal called Boots, Shoes and Fashion), and learned of the artist’s earliest experiences with sculpture. Quoting Freud in the interview:

I have always drawn and made things and consider my first sculptural experience to have been in the sandpit at nursery school. I loved the feel of things, the feel of sand in water and the feel of chocolate powder on the finger and the feel of silk and satin. Working with different mediums and materials was something I got from my various studies.

Nonhuman and nonliving materials are crucial to Jane’s aesthetic, as “tactile” experiences. She went on to explain in the interview, as well, the immense impact of women on her life. It was not until after she achieved success as an artist, using her mother’s name McAdam, that Jane began to identify as a Freud; Sigmund is on her paternal side. But like her great-grandfather and father, the feminist Freud had an intense interest in the power of objects to influence human emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. I remember growing up and hearing from my mother about Sigmund’s abundant collections of artifacts. These artifacts greatly influenced the art of grandson Lucien, as well as great-granddaughter Jane. 

Jane’s father had painted and commented quite a bit on the vitality of objects. But in speaking to Jane’s beloved partner, Peter, after her death, he emphasized the importance of objects and nonliving matter in Jane’s work, particularly found objects. In his words: “Jane’s found object art [brings] back to life those objects that man has discarded and reminds people of our interaction with the environment.” So the inanimate and the inanimate are simultaneously represented in this kind of work.

In her interest in these fluid boundaries between life and death, or the animate and the object, Jane’s art can be viewed as a call to environmental advocacy and action. Concerned about the planet, she wanted her art to speak to future generations from a deeply philosophical position. In her own words, she stated: “I feel passionately about the big questions that evoke most art—about life’s meaning, such as our relationship to time, nature, each other, and religion,” she said. Speaking of religion, Jane voiced to me on many occasions her skepticism about institutions for their overreliance on patriarchy. Yet, she did believe in something sacred about creation itself, and much of her art celebrates women as molders and makers of the Earth.       

In July and August 2015, the Gazelli Art House in London presented Mother Mould, a solo exhibition of Jane’s new and emerging sculptures at the time. Her spherical sculptures creatively capture the concept of “mother” as “container” and creator of life.

You can visit the Gazelli Art House exhibition website here. Considering psychoanalysis’s patriarchal focus on the figure of the father, I find Jane’s representation of the mother as “moulder” of creation quite refreshing.

Three years later, Jane revealed her talent for representational portraiture, in painting an image of my own mother, Joan. It is an image that closely captures the Joan with whom Jane had grown quite close. Indeed, the painting realistically represents every detail, from Mom’s almond-shaped eyes to her free-flowing hair. It is an example of Jane’s fascination with the human form, and the many ways to represent human embodiment, from the literal to the conceptual.

Hanging proudly on my mother’s wall today, this drawing was given us by Jane in 2019, the year in which we all spent a magical week together just months before the world shut down early in 2020. At that this time, Jane also gave my family another painting that shows her alternative move towards a non-representational aesthetic. This “gift” painting by Jane fascinates through its abstraction:

The artist used oil paints and placed my parents’ initials on one panel. While the paint was still wet, she placed the second panel on it and, therefore, produced the mirror image of the first panel. The result creates a kind of diptych, a colorful set of parallel images. These might question the nature of art and representation itself.

Jane’s paintings and sculptures may not seem explicitly environmentalist, in that they often are abstract and non-representational. They do not typically depict nature or place. However, I believe her artwork is ecological in that her methods and subject matter involve a decentering of the human subject. As I work through my own writings related to ecofeminism, women writers, and the environment, the feminist Freud—my dear friend—reminds me that the arts and humanities can, in fact, advocate for and prioritize a care for the Earth, and that we have to “paddle [our] own canoe” in how ecological masterworks might speak to us.