Welcome to the R.A.W.

The Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) is a platform for collaborative, experimental art-research practices that root in rural ecologies and work toward more imaginative, responsive, and respectful ways of inhabiting.

The R.A.W. is both a plot of land and waterways and a collective habitation for experimental ecological art practices set in rural realms, or more precisely at frayed edges of rural/urban divides – and immersed in flows of all the faunal, floral, mineral, chemical, rooty and rhizomatic forms that comprise them. In the places it has stook its claims so far, the R.A.W. has grounded experimental art-research practices in expanded frames through creative acts of un/naming and unmapping, experimental agri/cultural collaborations, and other modes that work toward more respectful ways of inhabiting more-than-human worlds.

Different R.A.W. methods and techniques comprise an intimate and collaborative process of thinking-with the land, where “thinking” is not just human mental activity that results in linguistic production but also methods of moving listening sensing attuning and sometimes sitting still in quiet awe of all that flows beyond the scope and scale of what one earthly inhabitant can ever recognize or render legible.

The principal investigator of the R.A.W. is Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart), an artist-researcher who seeks “untold” stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, microbes, and many others. For more than two decades, this transdisciplinary art-research practice has investigated frayed edges of languages and submerged wisdoms of earthly bodies, through durational performance, material-poetics, video/sound installation, and experimental book arts. R.A.W. cultivates time-based, multimedia forays like R.A.W. Assmilk Soap, She-Haw Transhumance, m<other tongues, Welcome to the Secretome, and The Unnaming of Aliass. Early journeys through the rural US South with Aliass, Passenger, and many others began in 2002 with the Little Pilgrim of Carcassonne, followed by Dead-Car Crossing, and the “Can We Sleep in your Barn Tonight?” MYSTERY TOUR. K-Haw has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and a PhD in Environmental Humanities from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

A Little R.A.W. History

K-Haw founded the R.A.W. in 2008 in Carnesville, Georgia and, with Sean Hart, cultivated its earliest incarnations on a neglected farmstead with a ramshackle barnyard and patch of hardwood forest. Then the whole big ass family herd moved west to golden pastures of Orland, California in 2011, going north to Oregon soon after. Since 2014 the R.A.W. has been grounded in a plot of paddocks and woods in what’s known now as the Coast Range foothill forests just west of a town called Philomath, Oregon, traditional homeground of the Champinefu Kalapuya. The R.A.W. reckons the hidden histories of this land, while at the same time cultivating fertile (if far-flung) associations with others around the planet.

Celebrating its ten-year anniversary in 2018, the R.A.W. began shifting gears toward new ways to both reach out and to go deeper into places and ways we inhabit — to enmesh and share its mode of contemporary creative explorations with other rural adventurers, both very-local and worldwide. The R.A.W. cultivates knotty nodes and possibilities for collaborations of all kinds, but especially projects that mix the generative provocations of contemporary ecological art practices with the fertile (agri)cultural energies of rural places.

Please feel free to get in touch with any collaborative ideas, suggestions, and/or radical curatorial propositions:

Email ~ rural.alchemy.workshop{at}gmail.com