A really refreshing and inventive collection of essays that weaves artistic and literary criticism with personal reflection to examine our material and psychic entanglements with the earth. Deftly sidestepping the pitfalls of empty abstraction and emotional distance that often tends to mark such enquiry, Rebecca Tamás offers a generous, intimate, and yet philosophically nuanced vision for thinking and feeling a broken world.
The most surprising and effective move made here might be the unlikely dialogue initiated between the ‘earth-body’ work of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and the figure of the Green Man most often associated with pagan rites of fertility and renewal. In recognising their shared strangeness, Tamás reminds us that the tools for reimagining the living body—in an individual and planetary sense—are often already in our possession.
A slim but powerful invitation to see ourselves and the world through new eyes.
