On Meadow Mimicry as Playful Care
- by Renée Rhodes, Vesper Meadow Artist-in-Partnership
As the summer warmed I drove to Vesper Meadow from San Francisco for my third annual visit. The drive feels faster each year. The fire scar along I-5, visible as I crest the bend towards Lake Shasta, no longer shocks me. Each year it becomes a more familiar landmark. When I arrived at Vesper Meadow this year, I saw the subtle mauve gold bands of tufted hairgrass standing out above the streaks of grayish brown foxtail—slight color shifts mark subtle meadow topographies. I have slowly come to know these grasses and what July feels like in this place.
With each year's visit, I bring questions about the relationships between mimicry, play, and care, and as the darkness of climate collapse and species extinction surrounds us, I'm increasingly curious about creative allyship with other species. I am here to practice being in devoted relationship with a prairie and to promote ways of seeing and perception that are about ecological inquiry and friendship. What do I see and come to know about when I reposition my body to a grasshopper's eye view or when I enact movement in collaboration with sunlight, wind, or forms of landwork previously done by an ancestor or a beaver?
These are not new ideas or even my ideas. They are curiosities shaped by many others, some of whom are credited below.*
Sometimes I get impatient and wonder what art is truly for in this moment. What use are metaphors in the face of such loss? But, I always seem to loop back around to the idea that art is a form of play and that play is a form of care. We play with our kids, our family members, our lovers, our animal companions. We play to relate and to love. If I want to have a real connection with a prairie, it makes sense that sometimes my caring would also include play. It's just one humble way of being together.
These are some of the visual stories and aesthetic games I've played during my past three summer visits to Vesper Meadow.
Disappearing Acts
Mosaic Mirage is a video that experiments with blending, mimicry, and disappearance in collaboration with grasses, sunlight, wind, the quilting traditions of my great grandmothers, the photographic traditions that seem to really captivate me and many of my other species-mates, and the movement traditions of postmodern queer and feminist dancers.
At first, I imagined making a quilt as a sort of bird-watching hide: one where I could blend into the meadow, human form obscured, undetectable (by sight) so that I could watch the meadowlarks flit past. I started this project in 2021 by taking photographs in the meadow with a macro camera lens, crawling around, immersed in grasses over my head, seeing from a grasshopper-eye view as best I could. There is so much color, texture, movement, density, and maximalist liveliness once you drop the two-legged perspective and submerge fully into a meadow. It becomes harder and harder to see a prairie as empty, open, or available when you start to notice butterfly eggs clinging to blades of grass, the bird's nests hidden on the ground, the mycelium sprawling in a dense network under every fallen leaf, the camas seeds stored deep in the soil.
Mardon Skipper Habitat Mosaic Quilt
Habitat Mosaic Quilt (large)
With my first photographs, I focused especially on the native Roemer's fescue and tufted hairgrass and then onto the European meadow foxtail. Eventually, I printed these images onto fabric and cut the repeating floret print into separate sampler squares. I also made sunprints on fabric coated with photosensitive dye. In collaboration with the sun, I created textured traces of fescue, brome, butterfly wings, tangles of grass straw, and bird's nests. The organic materials came from fragmented prairie habitats in California and Oregon.
Quilt Details
Habitat Mosaic Quilt Detail
Habitat Mosaic Quilt (small)
This collection of sampler squares is in photographic and photosynthetic collaboration with the sun and plants. Once back at home in San Francisco, I patched the fabric pieces back together creating a large camouflage quilt as a sort of habitat mosaic.
When I returned to Vesper Meadow in the following summer of 2022, I intended to sit still in the meadow covered up in this big quilted hide. I wanted to watch birds and just see who would come by. Instead, another game called to me; the charisma of wind in grass somehow felt like a more familiar language, a more relatable kind of communication. The dancer in me sees movement and wants to play along. Once wrapped up in the quilt I saw that the grassy camouflage print would enable me to mimic the colors and textures of the place and I saw that my own movements could enable me to mimic the movement and flow of the wind in the grass.
I made a simple set of movement instructions (a score) that invited me into presence with this place.
The movement score went like this:
• wrap in the quilt at golden hour
• enter the floret portal: match digital floret to physical floret
• 3 deep breaths: crossfading human body with grass bodies
• catch and refract wind and sunlight: move between revealing and disappearing
• catch and hold shadow and shade: move to disappear, blend, blur
Disappearing is a dramatic word. I don't mean it from a place of guilt, shame, or apocalyptic panic as in: we humans should not be here, we would be better off gone. I mean disappearing as in: what if we practiced blending in with the surround, disappearing the sense of separateness that has come to exist between some human animals and the animacy of a prairie?
Embodying Hay Field Dynamics
Foxtail harvest pile
During that same visit in the summer of 2022, I borrowed an old scythe and harvested a small patch of European meadow foxtail (Alopecurus pratensis.) I was curious about Vesper Meadow as a former hay field, filled with this meadow foxtail which so easily outcompetes the native bunchgrasses that call this place home too. The hay field is one voice singing one idea. This outcompeting creates an absence of habitat, food, and nursery grounds for other species like the mardon skipper and the Vesper sparrow—two key species supported through ongoing education and restoration activities at Vesper Meadow.
I wanted to understand how to embody the labor called for by a singular species of overly present grass, while also wondering how the foxtail itself could be included in processes of restoration and space-making for native species. My guiding question was: how can I move the foxtail to make more space for native bunchgrasses but in a way that simultaneously builds a relationship with the foxtail and includes the foxtail in a generative act of restoration?
I recently learned that the scything of hay grass prairies is a studied form of Polish traditional ecological knowledge—a practice from the Indigenous place of one of my family lineages. This ancestry is so diluted for me that I don't fixate on it too much. Still, it feels interesting to play at a game of doing ancestrally related landwork while yearning towards repair and healing in the present. I don't really mean this as magical metaphorical thinking but simply as a life practice where healing is as practical a need as making dinner or playing with a child in your life.
I cut foxtail grasses for hours, re-enacting, re-embodying, getting sore, and probably less good at the repetitive scything motion as I went. I learned the motion from an asynchronous stranger on YouTube earlier in the day: swivel from the hip, blade parallel to earth, arms and torso following through until the grass blades slice and fall flat. I twisted, swung, sliced, and then I let the fallen grass dry for two weeks in the field.
Image: Ropes drying in the field
Once it was dry, I returned to the meadow with my friend Zoe. We begin to hand-making some rope. It's a dance and a movement score too—a common one that lots of people know, and that was again passed to me via the availability of people explaining things on the internet.
It goes like this:
• separate the strands into two bundles
• the leftmost, tightens, screws, twists in a counterclockwise rotation
• wrap the left-over top of the rightmost bundle
• take the new leftmost bundle and repeat the tightening; twist counterclockwise and then wrap over top of the rightmost bundle; on and on into an infinity or until you run out of foxtail
I like to watch the rhythmic linearity of the process as it becomes non-linear, looping, and tangled. I made something useful, even if in a tiny quantity. Does anyone need any rope?
Re-meandering
Video: Foxtail & Willow
Latgawa Creek which runs through Vesper Meadow is deeply incised from years of being over-trodden by cattle, by years of willow removal, by the overhunting and removal of beavers. This impacts the dryness of the land, the risk of fire, the grasses that can grow here or not, and the species that will go extinct or not. Adding small dams into the creek means slowing water flow down, re-meandering the creek and its floodplain, and creating seasonal flooding that would give the native bunchgrasses their favored growing conditions.
Image: Zoe and the willow cuttings
After making a coil of rope, Zoe and I cut several willow stakes, strapped these to their back and hiked to a fast moving part of the creek said to be eroding and incising deeper each day. We planted the willow and wove the foxtail rope in between the new willow plantings. It created a small dam, a toy for barely-there late summer waters. This gesture of care and play was washed away by winter I'm sure, but maybe the willows will take.
Image: Foxtail rope and Willow stake plantings in Latgawa Creek
During this summer's visit, I joined the Be the Beaver workshop that Jeanine and Stasie of the Vesper Meadow staff team led with about 10 community members. We learned about low-tech process-based restoration and worked to create two Post Assisted Log Structures in Latgawa Creek. Our work consisted of stuffing branches, debris, and clods of soil—sloughed off of the steep creek bank—in between two downed trees. Once all the negative spaces were filled, the trees and debris acted to slow the water. We watched as it pooled up a little around us. This set of actions, when repeated at various points throughout the creek, will hopefully one day raise the creek's overall water level flush with the rest of the meadow, once again creating a more shallow and meandering creek bed, accompanied by a dynamic meadow floodplain. This could create the conditions for native bunchgrasses and their animal companions to flourish.
Image: Jeanine carrying debris during the Be the Beaver workshop
Stasie and volunteers work together to build a Post Assisted Log Structure
During this summer workshop, it felt like such a relief to practice repair and land connection in community with many others doing the same. It was serious care work, but also it was fun and playful. I noticed how this practice too is one of mimicry and blending in with the ecosystem around us as we literally used our human bodies to do the work of beavers.
Again and again I see mimicry, play, and care as intertwining practices which are inherent to art-making, restoration, and to living an ecologically principled life. It matters what kinds of movements and practices we put into our bodies. They can open up unexpected points of relation and emotional connection to ourselves, each other, and the prairie surround that we are, as ever, enmeshed so deeply within.
*Here are some writings and writers whose work and ideas have greatly influenced me over the past few years:
As We Have Always Done and Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dark Ecology and Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
Nature by Design: People, Natural Process, and Ecological Restoration by Eric Higgs
Stories, ideas, and traditional ecological and scientific knowledge graciously passed orally and by example to me from Jeanine Moy and Stasie Maxwell from the Vesper Meadow staff team.
The dances, movement scores, and embodiment practices of postmodern dancers like Lisa Nelson—passed to me from Oakland-based movement mentor Margit Galanter.