Artworks

‘Re-Wilding is an invitation to undo control.’ Post-Rational, it is a vision that challenges the division between feeling and thought. Instead of promoting human separation and supremacy in the Chain of Being, Re-Wilding advocates a heightened connection. While according to modern Western perception, aesthetics is tied to beauty and form, its earlier more broader meaning is related to felt experience – derived from the Greek aistheta (perceptible things) and aisthesthai (perceive). It is this original meaning which best accounts for the re-emergence of Re-Wilding. It is because we are done with the sterility of control, the fantasy of human mastery, because we seek a deeper creative and spiritual connection to the earth and to culture, it is unsurprising that we now enshrine a ‘reflexive sensitivity, one that attempts to understand by attending carefully to what is being experienced …  a sensitivity to imperfection and impermanence.’ As Julian Baggini resumes, in How the World Thinks,  it is only thereby that we can, today, assume a ‘relational self’ This is because a ‘proper understanding of the world and ourselves is found as much in the spaces between things as it is in the things themselves’. This attentiveness both to things and the spaces between things, our heightened awareness of the interconnection of the organic and inorganic, substance and its nurturing void, ‘can be seen as almost a kind of religious observance.’ 

Instead of projecting ideals onto the world, what is now required is a ‘trained intuition.’ We need to reinvent how and what we look at, what we see. As Owen Flanagan has said, truth-seeking is ‘transcendentally pretentious.’ Instead, after Baggini, we now require ‘the taxonomy of [the] cubist, disaggregating and pluralist perspectives’ that are ‘suggestive rather than definite.’ This is the core drive of Re-Wilding as a principle and an art exhibition. As its curator, Karen Cullinan, notes, ‘In this exhibition, the term expands beyond ecology to encompass the emotional, cultural, spiritual, and political terrains that have been shaped, managed, and constrained. Romanticism, as a radically counterintuitive drive against Classicism, is a vital precursor. As Charles Baudelaire noted in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.’ Thus, formal innovation meets passion. Order unbuckles. And the rhizome – the indomitable and resilient weed – overruns all controlled and controlling systems.