Remote Artist-in-Residence
Karin Bolender/
R.A.W.
About the Artist
Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher who seeks "untold" stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, pollinators, microbes, and many others. Under the auspices of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), she cultivates a homegrown, collaborative living-art-research practice that explores dirty words and entangled wisdoms of earthly ecologies through performance, writing, video/sound installation, and other experimental arts of multispecies storytelling. Durational and site-specific projects and performances, including R.A.W. Assmilk Soap, Gut Sounds Lullaby, and Welcome to the Secretome, have taken place across the US and in Canada, Europe, and Australia.
K-Haw has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and a PhD in Environmental Humanities from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. A book called The Unnaming of Aliass, exploring nearly two decades of roadside and barnyard living-art practice, is forthcoming from punctum in summer 2020. The R.A.W. family herd lives amidst the patchwork forests of the Oregon Coast Range hills, east of the ocean and west of the Cascades.
The R.A.W. PostLibrary
The R.A.W. PostLibrary is an ecological LivingArtResearch performance-residency, exploring the hyperlocal/hyperglobal ecologies of staying-at-home, whatever “home” might mean.
Located in Philomath, Oregon, the PostLibrary is stewarded by Karin Bolender aka K-Haw Hart, and operates as a material exchange where ideas might grow and multiply through cross-pollination. Through wordplay and other mischief, this project will develop over time and organically, in response to diverse contributions of flora and fauna, human interlocutors, friends and strangers, remotely and materially.
The PostLibrary is literally a library on a fence post, designed and built by Sean Hart and K-Haw mostly from materials found around the R.A.W. in early April 2020; but it is also a conceptual proposition that questions how we might practice unexpected forms of storying-exchange and co-composition amidst all the different inhabitants of places, whether mammalian or vegetal or microbial. With traditional libraries closed these days, the R.A.W. PostLibrary proposes that we open a new kind of exploratory space for more porous storytelling and knowledge-making exchanges—beyond the book-bound anthropocentric models we tend to take for granted. This page will be updated with dispatches and reflections from K-Haw’s rural home pastures and forests, in relation to the ecological practice that is the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.).
May 6, 2020
The R.A.W. PostLibrary is opening . . . slowly. Much more slowly than the rate at which the apple blossoms from the tree above it have burst open and invited pollination and begun fluttering down all around, all over the ground.
At present, opening but slowly, the R.A.W. PostLibrary holds not volumes of text but volumes of flowing time.
Posts are made to hold things, maybe more so bodies (in or out?). A good post is sunk deep and sturdy, but the spaces between them are porous. Very porous, indeed. So here at the R.A.W., in the midst of newfangled flows of time and barbed questions of what “staying-home” means, we are presently pondering the question of how posts—and, for that matter, postlibraries--might hold and exchange volumes of impossible flowing time, be they sluggish and strained or furiously fast as raindrops and appleblossoms.
So we invite you to watch this space as we explore together the questionable holdings of posts, and the flowing spaces between, as the slow opening of the R.A.W. PostLibrary rolls on in seasons of uncertainty. . . .
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At present, opening but slowly, the R.A.W. PostLibrary holds not volumes of text but volumes of flowing time.
Posts are made to hold things, maybe more so bodies (in or out?). A good post is sunk deep and sturdy, but the spaces between them are porous. Very porous, indeed. So here at the R.A.W., in the midst of newfangled flows of time and barbed questions of what “staying-home” means, we are presently pondering the question of how posts—and, for that matter, postlibraries--might hold and exchange volumes of impossible flowing time, be they sluggish and strained or furiously fast as raindrops and appleblossoms.
So we invite you to watch this space as we explore together the questionable holdings of posts, and the flowing spaces between, as the slow opening of the R.A.W. PostLibrary rolls on in seasons of uncertainty. . . .
