We Have Never Only Been Human feels like an invitation to conceive of ourselves otherwise through a refusal to capitulate to dominant, colonial understandings of embodiment and relationality. To unlearn stories of bodies as discrete entities through those that tell different stories, those that we might know deep in our bones or might come to us when we rest in a mossy bed. Intuitive stories that stretch the body, stories about how we are enmeshed within the land and the land is enmeshed within us. It is this kind of story that Ella’s work tells me, as she seamlessly makes visible the leakiness of our bodies with the land and the beings who know it to be home, always including us. Land and life that we can too easily relate to as separate, passive recipients upon which we enact our human doings.
Ella’s watery scenes invite moving through violent and imagined separations between us / them as culture / nature respectively and a letting go of the fallacy ‘that we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end’. Imbued with a trust in water to carry these stories, so bereft of the richness of interdependence and co-emergence, and allowing others to flow through us, or fall around us like speculative seeds holding possibilities for other ways of being / knowing / relating. Beyond the soundscape of listening to birdsong as though beneath water, I carry this invitation with me to the land where I tend damp soil while barn swallows dart above, noticing the way the soil, seeds and song, extend into me, making me up.
The slowed pace of this work embraces a different kind of being with the passing of time, a kind of temporality that I yearn for amidst the pace and pressures of commercial food growing. A deeper time that seeds, as ancient teachers, know as they wait (im)patiently or eagerly or ambivalently for the conditions that bring about their germination - that messy mulch pile that Ella speaks to that might transform them into sprouting life - conditions I strive to bring to them when I sow them into compost, hopeful for our collaboration to see seedlings emerge into plants-medicines, who sustain us through the seasons. Bearing witness to them, learning from them, on the land and in Ella’s piece as we watch them fall feels like a remembering of our debts to these beings, how they nourish us, how they are us / we are them and just how much we have to learn from them - about time, being, relation if only we listen to their worlds and wisdoms. To listen to ancient beings though, we must slow down and Ella’s work offers us a slowing, a close contemplation of the unassuming lifeworlds that have been around longer than we might comprehend. I am reminded of Bayo Akomolafe’s plea that ‘the times are urgent, let us slow down’.
The human body enmeshed within watery, mossy, living worlds that Ella depicts is a refusal to make sense of ourselves as having ever ‘only been human’. The absence of sharp lines, a refusal to reproduce processes of bordering that insidiously sever us from all our relations and extensions of our bodies. Ella opens the body up and we observe the world seep in. In attending to the seemingly small - seeds, mosses, lichens - I feel the salvation of a queer refusal of the mighty that we might have inherited from colonial romanticism. Through these refusals, amidst a watery soundscape, the borders of the unitary body wash away. The senselessness of such an embodiment is marked and the way made for one in which our being extends spatially and temporally and relationality as we might know it collapses only to swell again.
In an exhibition emphasising the importance of embodied presence as a means to reclaim our connection to the world, Ella’s scans and modellings of mosses, lichens, boggy waters, earth and falling speculative seeds welcomes us to embody all the messy entanglements with these beings, to lean into these experiences of our bodies. The moving images she has created makes irrefutable their aliveness, challenging us to inflate ideas of our embodiment beyond the imagined bounds of our bodies into the murky depths of the land to unearth other stories we might tell about who we are in a reclamation of our shared being and all our relations.
