Only What We Love: Understanding Materials as Shared Narrative

Jane Brucker & Dr. Jeremy Wasser

PART OF A SERIES OF TALKS by Trier University of Applied Sciences

How can a desire for sustainable living manifest in an ethical art practice without being driven by store bought materials or limited to natural materials such as rocks and sticks? Can material choices contribute to the creation of individual or shared narratives that satisfy our human need for continuity and placemaking on a disturbingly fast-changing planet?

Artist Jane Brucker’s material choices are a response to this poetic and ecological challenge. In this presentation, Brucker and her partner/collaborator, biologist and historian of medicine Dr. Jeremy Wasser, marry science and aesthetics to discuss an approach to materials that embrace an ethic of care as a critical social aspect of sustainability. They take as inspiration a quote from the great Senegalese forestry engineer Baba Dioum he notes, “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”