Bewildered

Featuring M Acuff, Renee Couture, and Carolyn Hopkins

As residents of the Pacific Northwest’s more rural reaches, Hopkins, Couture and Acuff have built lives in which the land and its fragilities are experienced directly. Fleeing forest fire, caring for animals who cannot escape smoke-filled air, losing barns to wind, and picking up debris after flood waters subside have become near annual routines. Negotiating anthropocentric climate change and its resulting catastrophes is simply the new daily normal. Our love of remote and natural places must be reconciled with the bewilderment we feel at our own entanglement in the systems, economies and histories that have initiated, and perpetuate, this ongoing war against the earth.

Collectively, our work asks how we are part of the making and unmaking of this relationship.  How land stewardship may mean considering notions of ecology and restoration in new ways, as well as our own fragility. Our work…