The R.A.W. is . . .
. . . presently in an exciting period of transformation (and under construction, webwise).
Since 2008, the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) has been a home base for a collaborative interdisciplinary art practice that roots in rural landscapes (all the faunal, floral, and mineral forms that inhabit them) and human acts of metaphor, un/naming, memory, and imagination. Through experimental arts, the Rural Alchemy Workshop explores the porous seams between humans and other kinds of being, especially other domestic species, while seeking the deepest roots of our common histories, passions, and needs.
The principal investigator of the R.A.W. is Karin Bolender (K-Haw) Hart, an artist-researcher who seeks “untold” stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, microbes, and many others. For almost two decades, her interdisciplinary art practice has been exploring dirty (ass) words and entangled wisdoms of earthly bodies, through performance, writing, video/sound installation, and experimental book arts. In the company of she-asses Aliass and Passenger and a diverse herd of humans and other species, her projects cultivate experimental multimedia forays like R.A.W. Assmilk Soap, the She-Haw Transhumance series, Gut Sounds Lullaby, and The Unnaming of Aliass. Early journeys through the rural American South with Aliass and Passenger and many others began with the Little Pilgrim of Carcassonne (2002), followed by Dead-Car Crossing (2004) and the “Can We Sleep in your Barn Tonight?” MYSTERY TOUR (2006). The site-specific Rodeo Lab playfully subverts the breakneck speeds and dominance paradigms of traditional rodeo events like Bulldogging and Team-Roping, in search of slower and more contemplative ways of being and knowing embodied others. 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 on a little ass farm tucked into a ramshackle barnyard and patch of woods in Carnesville, Georgia. The whole big ass family of the R.A.W. relocated in 2011 to the golden light and shadowy buttes of the northern Sacramento Valley in California, and then again in 2012 to the mossy forests and sweeping grass valleys of western Oregon. Since 2014, the R.A.W. has been grounded in a home-plot of paddocks and backwoods in the Coast Range foothills just west of the small town of Philomath, Oregon, while at the same time cultivating fertile (if far-flung) associations with others around the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places.
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 ecologies we call home — 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 get in touch with any collaborative ideas, suggestions, and/or radical curatorial propositions:
Email ~ rural.alchemy.workshop{at}gmail.com
The R.A.W. is . . .
. . . presently in an exciting period of transformation (and under construction, webwise). Since 2008, the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) has been a home base for a collaborative interdisciplinary art practice that roots in rural landscapes (all the faunal, floral, and mineral forms…
R.A.W. Projects/Processes
Since 2008, the Rural Alchemy Workshop has been both a barnyard-based site/familial homeplace and an interdisciplinary art practice that explores that specific place in the midst of its myriad inhabitants and broader global situation. A number of major projects illustrate some of the R.A.W.’s…
Kultivating m<Other Tongues
As part of the marvelous Multispecies Storytelling exhibition and conference that took place in Vaxjo, Sweden, Kultivator and the R.A.W. collaborated in a project that invited aspiring multispecies storytellers to join us in a dusty, transoceanic co-elaboration of m<other tongue culturing amidst meshes of entangled…
Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practice (Vaxjo, Sweden)
– a collaboration between The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, Linnæus University and Växjö Konsthall. The project is generously supported by The Seed Box, Linköping University. I am excited and honored to participate as both artist and a keynote presenter–alongside the venerable Vinciane Despret,…
Here Come the Ecosexuals!
On July 19th, the R.A.W. was beyond thrilled to welcome world-renowned performance artists and ecosexual revolutionaries Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle for the Philomath, Oregon premiere of their magical new film about the pleasures and perils of living and loving on a watery planet ….
“Welcome to the Secretome” at E.A.R.T.H. Lab’s SEEDBED: A Soil Symposium
Open call: M/others and Future Humans
In association with the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology and The Multispecies Salon, R.A.W. is excited to contribute to the buzzing energies of a curatorial swarm bringing together the international traveling exhibition, M/Others and Future Humans. This exhibition will bring together works by a…
“A New We” opening at Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway), featuring R.A.W. and Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology present “Welcome to the Secretome (Trondheim)”
Rachel Mayeri: Video still from Primate Cinema: Apes as Family (2012), 22 minutes. Actor: Denise Pearlman. Two channel installation. Courtesy of the artist. A New We 14.09 – 21.12 2017 Amanda Ackerman & Dan Richert, Honey Biba Beckerlee, Ursula Biemann, Karin Bolender, Francisco Gallardo & Audrey Samson, Kathy…
Manure, Mud, and Microbial Mother-Tongues ~ Findings from the Secretome
On a bright late April morning in Philomath, Oregon, a crew of intrepid seekers of microbial encounters braved deep mud, steamy manure, and swirling barn-dust, then undertook a peculiar hunt for invisible “treasures” in the wet grass of the pasture, all as part of…
The Secretome beckons . . .
What strange treasures will discover us in the barn dust, wet grass, and brewing mud? What secrets will we gather from encounters with the Great Muzzle Tongue? Come find out, on April 29th from 10-12: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/welcome-to-the-secretome-tickets-33089754346
Opening in Berlin ~ Articulations Beyond the Human: Karin Bolender and Amanda Ackerman
Curated by Ida Bencke and Anna De Pascale November 2016 This exhibition at Buro BDP in Berlin accompanies the launch of two new publications in the Parapoetics Series from Broken Dimanche Press/Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology: RAW Assmilk Soap, by Karin Bolender, and…
Who lives here?
Let’s start this off with the old R.A.W. questions: Who lives here? What are you looking for? Where do you go now? Is it a place, or a way of life? And what is on the other side? These seemingly-simple questions have guided the…
