Nature As Nurture
If you are a regular or if you have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art welcome. This year, we hope that our stories as well as the artists that we feature will inspire you to start your own creative journey, and our house team of writers will join you on this ride. This August, our inspiration is Swedish artist Joakim Allgulander. And today’s essay on healing power of nature when economy is in turmoil was written by our reader Lidia Oshlyansky, who is slowly becoming one of our regular house writers.
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200,000 plus people were made redundant or layed off in the tech industry in the last year according to at least one respected source (TechCrunch). If you’ve been reading the financial and tech news as part of your chosen news sources you’ll know that 2022 and 2023 have been tough years. I’ve been working in tech most of my adult life, 26 years now. My company was hit like so many others and the start of 2023 saw us having to make some really difficult decisions including redundancies. I had to let folks from my teams go, and I also left myself. A redundancy process is just painful no matter how lovely and kind the company is (and mine was extremely so). To recover some energy and to recenter myself I’d decided to take a few months off before looking for another role. Thus, I found myself on a gallery outing with my friend Maja on a random weekday.
We walked into the Galleri Duerr filled with lush, layered, gorgeous paintings by Joakim Allgulander of plants and water and clouds, but all was not as it seemed; grids, coats of paint that from far away produced a rich illusion and closer up revealed another layer of meaning. I was mesmerised by the water-like landscapes in particular. I was drawn into them, their shimmer, their darkness and their depth. I kept walking closer and further away from each of them; up to them, back from them. The separation from our natural environments due to our own manufactured realities and the tech world I’ve worked in for so long was coming up to the surface.
We will look at the plants in the greenhouse, we like the photos of nature but we don’t want the messy weeds in our gardens. We are trying to control and contain and we are removing ourselves from that which is all around us. It made me think about my own history as an urbanite living in a “greenhouse”, my flats in Chicago and London where there was a deck or a balcony with a couple of potted plants. Urban settings where I would find oases of nature for calm: the lake shore in Chicago, Hampstead Heath or the old railway walk in Finsbury Park in London. These were my sources for recharging, for calm, for peace. In Stockholm, my life has been the opposite, one where I go into the city to recharge on some urbanism and my day to day is surrounded by nature. I live with a seemingly endless garden with its raspberry jungle and its 6 (and a half) apple trees. I’ve had to learn and adjust to living with nature taking control all around me and me having very little control of it. The nature around me now isn’t confined to a balcony, a deck, a greenhouse, it grows where it wants and how it wants and all I can do is try to get some measure of order. Anyone who has ever fought the losing war on stinging nettles will relate to the fact that there is no control of what nature wants to do in the long term.
Musing about my own relationship to nature, how I’d kept it at bay and how that’s changed since I moved to a countryside house, Deborah Duerr, the gallery owner pointed out that they had a smaller room to the side which also had some of Allgulander’s paintings. Still blissfully removed from my normal day to day of screens, emails and video calls, I expected more paintings on the natural world. However, I was confronted by a large canvas of crowded speech bubbles that became so indistinguishable as my eyes moved towards the top. I burst out laughing. The kind gallery owner looked at me quizzically, Maja, thankfully, simply asked what was up.
“That’s my life,” I responded, unable to stop my nervous giggles.
More quizzical looks followed.
“I mean it’s literally my life every day at work. You start out with a couple of messages first thing in the morning and then more and more and more, then the London folks get into the office and then New York comes online and more and more and more...”
That painting and the smaller water colours around it had touched a raw nerve. I had spent the previous months at work letting people go from jobs they liked and needed and leaving myself, this included countless difficult and often emotional conversations over various electronic communication platforms (Slack, Email, Whatsapp etc). And here it all was in a painting in this room. The overwhelming feeling that you get when your inbox and your instant messaging fills up, like the top of the painting where you can no longer see a singular speech bubble.Feeling somewhat self conscious, to say the least, I had an odd thought about how my work by necessity had also removed me from the natural world of communicating face to face with people, to emailing or video calls instead of talking in person. It’s the reality of an international job with folks located all over on all timezones. I’ve become extremely used to it. For many the covid lock downs and working from home had been huge adjustments, for me it just meant less time in the office locked into a meeting room to have video calls and instead having those same calls from my own home.
Allgulander’s work continued to be on my mind in the weeks that followed. The precious time I’ve taken between jobs has given me the chance to step away from the screen, to leave my emails, slack messages and video calls behind. I’ve been taking longer walks in the woods and countryside around my house with my dog. I’ve been removing some of the layers of distance I had put in place between myself and the natural world, not all, but a few. So, when the next role comes, despite all the digital chatter and hours spent at a desk in front of the screen, I will be ready. I will take time to be in nature - the woods, the fields, with people face to face, and not always separated from them by a fence, a greenhouse, a screen. Real nature nurtures, I promise myself to remember.
