Rewilding/Hyperwilding

a collaborative project by Shomit Barua and Patricia Sannit

Rewilding: a form of conservation and ecological restoration that aims to improve biodiversity and ecosystem health by restoring natural processes and wilderness areas; reconnects people with the natural world and helps communities thrive.

Hyperwilderness: private and public re-wilding ventures which simulate ‘wilderness’ in an artificial or disassociative contexts.

We are human; we are a part of the natural world. This past year I have consciously moved towards making art that is collaborative and reminds of human embeddedness in the natural world and the interconnectedness of living organisms. I work across disciplines, including video, sound, sculpture, and painting. I primarily work in clay, a material from the earth which documents our planet’s life. I spend my time listening to rocks, grass, wind and water and unboundary the boundary between mediated nature and its wild selfness.

Collaborating with intermedia artist, Shomit Barua, is a window into the interface between the sensory world and the technological. He specializes in ecoacoustics and responsive environments, rooting his work in poetry and architecture.

I am a sculptor of clay and concrete, durable materials, frustratingly stolid. I work with desire to reconnect to nature, both through material, and by allowing the transitory and eternal truth of nature into my process.

In our collaborative installations, Shomit has fused digital and analog techniques with my sculptural objects of the physical world. He brings interactivity, creating a dynamic interface with the sensory world.

I am searching to re-wild my work and myself, to belong in nature, to emphasize the complex, intricate web of life, and to make work that impacts our senses and memory and reawakens our sensitivity to the life around us.

Rewilding series: Merge

Multimedia video installation 2022

4:56 min

Before leaving for an artist residency in northern Iceland, I read a tale about a woman who found herself slowly, gently, and beautifully, turning into rock. She gleamed with quartz amid her granite thighs and her breasts ran with colors of honed marble; as she walked, she felt the soothing jostling of pebbles in her belly and admired her fingers and toes which appeared to be water smoothed agate. And then the woman walked and rumbled to a new home amidst the generous, generating boulders and flows and edges of the stony mountains and became a part of them. Maybe she has always been a part of them.

I felt an impulse to merge into the endless rocks at Skagafjörður, Iceland 65.946240, -19.474962. I napped on the rocks, walked the rocks, and listened.

My work has always referenced history, human and geologic, and I have found personal solace in the continuity and repetition of history. Finding a home in the rocks, listening to their memories, I felt like I was part of the larger story that humans sometimes deny.

I tried to merge, I couldn’t really, but I dreamt of it.