Artistic research as environmental action; "how's the weather?"

A JOURNEY HOME: a proposal for tracking cultural and environmental change.
Morgan E. Zigler
CONTEXT: I am travelling home, from the UK, (where I have been studying art, and thereafter volunteering in a college which teaches students with special needs practical outdoor skills). I am attempting to make this journey through hitch-hiking and camping across mainland Europe, north to Norway, to Iceland by sea, and either to Greenland or directly to Canada, where I will hitch across Canada from east to west, volunteering on organic farms when I need a break, arriving home to the west coast. I view this journey as personal development, artistic research and an experiment in finding alternatives to conventional travel, which are often environmentally unsustainable. Through finding appropriate means of resource I aim to become more aware and sensitive to the impact I have on the environment. I intend to achieve this by camping while travelling, spending little, carrying little, and becoming adaptive. By putting myself into situations where I am forced to, for example, make dinner over a fire, and have to source dry wood in rainy weather, I will gain transferable skills for my own sufficiency, my self-sufficiency, and hope to make quite a large body of artwork in the process.
The drawings will be tracks, traces of my journey, which I would like to share with friends and loved ones along the way, by mailing these portraits out to them and encouraging their involvement and collaboration. This will communicate to a wider audience once I have arrived home, collected and exhibited them. Overall this project shall not only facilitate my interaction with the natural world, but also communicate it.

CONTENT: This project is the documentation of local ecosystems and my personal interaction with the people who transport me through them. I will begin recording quotes alongside these portraits from my interactions with the sitter/driver about the weather. On a personal level, it is important to me to be spending as much time in the natural world as possible, and so I shall be sleeping outside and ‘weathering’ the weather. As well as the portraits of those I meet through hitchhiking, my sketches will include observations from the natural world and the practical objects and structures I create, such as shelters, campfires, sculptures and crafts.

FORM: The material is an integral part in communicating the meaning of this project. These sketches will be drawn, with pen or pencil from life, on the back of found pieces of paper, when possible having some cultural imprint of our connection with the natural world. Through this medium I will be reusing a waste product. They will be created along with quotes about the common question, concern and conversation point, “how’s the weather”. Most of them will be in landscape format, both for ease of future exhibition, to be able to fit in the text that accompanies it. ‘Landscape’ orientation is the traditional form for documenting the natural world, and in a sense that is what I am doing, creating a landscape of different interactions with the weather, a survey of different opinions and feelings, an international census.

At the moment, in week three of this journey, i was picked up by the president of a company that installs wind farms, and have been studying the impact of how wind turbines may effect birds and bats. the next destination, after a brief visit to the mountains and an aritst's collective in Norway, will be to the peace camp in Iceland, in July.

Provisionally I have a website where the images I have drawn and sent out and some of the environments I have travelled through will be consistently posted along my journey, under the heading, “how’s the weather.” It also has some previous work, and a few stories from the beginning of my journey.
http://www.imagestation.com/members/mzigler

if you have any questions, contacts, constructive criticisms or ideas for collaboration, please email me at: boarder247@hotmail.com

thanks for your attention.

Morgan E. Zigler