R.A.W. Home
The Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) is a home-base/platform for collaborative interdisciplinary art practices that root in rural landscapes (all the faunal, floral, mineral, and chemical forms that comprise them) and specific acts of un/naming and imaginative, responsible, and respectfully inclusive inhabiting. Through experimental arts and research, the R.A.W. explores porous becomings among tangled lives, seeking “untold” stories amidst (un)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-research practice has been exploring dirty (“ass”) words and tangled 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, 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 on a little ass farm tucked into a ramshackle barnyard and patch of woods in Carnesville, Georgia. The whole big ass family moved westward in 2011, and 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 foothills just west of a town called Philomath, Oregon–on what is the traditional homeground of the Champinefu Kalapuya. The R.A.W. reckons the hidden histories of this landscape, 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 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 and justice-seeking 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
R.A.W. Home
The Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) is a home-base/platform for collaborative interdisciplinary art practices that root in rural landscapes (all the faunal, floral, mineral, and chemical forms that comprise them) and specific acts of un/naming and imaginative, responsible, and respectfully inclusive inhabiting. Through experimental arts…
R.A.W. Projects/Processes
Since 2008, the Rural Alchemy Workshop has been both a barnyard-based habitation and an interdisciplinary art practice that explores specific places in the midst of their myriad inhabitants and broader global situations. A number of major projects illustrate some of the R.A.W.’s processes and…
Get ready for an awesome display of R.A.W. power . . .
In November of 2021, the R.A.W. enjoyed a residency as the first fellow of the University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research/Knight Campus Project Incubator program. This residency took place inside the sparkling new Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, located…
Berlin Art LInk interview
Excited here about a recent feature by William Kherbek on The Unnaming of Aliass in Berlin Art Link: The Bioerotic Universe: An Interview with Karin Bolender.
Review of Unnaming in Burlington Contemporary
Mari Batashevski wrote a probing and thoughtful review of The Unnaming of Aliass for Burlington Contemporary. Mari’s website offers a thrilling syllabus/resource for a course called Clever Monkey–Stubborn Donkey.
R.A.W. INterview with MoreThanHuman Matters
The R.A.W. is honored to be featured in the latest from the Morethanhuman Matters series of interviews with scholars, artists, and others engaging in more-than-human realms of study and practice. The series is presented by the wonderful anthropologist, Sophie Chao, on her morethanhumanworlds site….
The One Minutes’s “Imagine the earth is your lover,” curated by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
The R.A.W. and She-Haw are thrilled to have a little video called “She-Haw Rope Tricks” included as a part of an ecosex series called “Imagine the Earth is Your Lover,” curated by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle and hosted by The One Minutes. The…
R.A.W. ‘Mirror Shots’ for Explorations of Now
Beginning on the bright morning/evening of August 31 and ending in smoky darkness on September 10, the R.A.W. was honored to take part in an exchange across time zones/oceans through a series of workshops at Kultivator in Sweden. These workshops were part of Explorations…
R.A.W. PostLibrary
A R.A.W. living-art-research project in association with Eugene Contemporary Art’s Common Ground
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 ….
Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) 