Article · October 2020 · 7 min read
Knowledge and Order in Chaos
From the 2020 Chale Wote performance: on what it means to make art in a time of ecological collapse, to impose form on material that insists on decomposing, and to find beauty in the entropy.
We work in an age of ecological collapse. To make art now is to make it against a background of burning forests, drowning coastlines and a throwaway culture that treats the earth as an inexhaustible supply and a bottomless bin. The question that drives the "Knowledge and Order in Chaos" work is simple: what does it mean to impose form on material that insists on decomposing?
The Western art object seeks immortality. The museum preserves. The conservator restores. The collector insures. The artwork is frozen in time, removed from cycles, denied its natural end. My work refuses this. The Nipadua artwork must be allowed to die. Biodegradable works return to soil. Ceramic works, if broken, are ground and returned to earth. Even durable works are designed, eventually, to return.
I do not fear the crack in the pot, the mold on the sculpture, the rot in the wood. Death is not failure. Death is completion. The seed must die to become the tree; the tree must die to become soil; the soil must become the seed again. The documentation of decay is as important as the documentation of creation. The smell of rot is as sacred as the smell of fresh clay.
Death is not failure. Death is completion. The seed must die to become the tree.
There is order in this chaos — not the imposed order of control, but the deeper order of the cycle. Entropy is not the enemy of meaning. It is the medium. When I gather bark from a fallen tree, I am not fighting decomposition; I am joining it, redirecting its energy into a form that will speak for a season before it, too, returns.
This is why my practice operates on what I call tree time. Some works take years to germinate. Some require a full rainy season to mature. Some cannot be rushed without violence to their nature. Some are never "finished" — they grow, season, die, regenerate. The tree does not apologise for not growing in winter. The artist does not apologise for not producing during rest.
To find beauty in the entropy is to make peace with our own place in the cycle. We are not saving nature. We are remembering that we are nature, remembering itself.
