Immersive installation, community discourse, cultural and physical mapping
EARTHflow project
· Art as a Catalyst for Reflection and Action
· Cultural and Ecological Relationships
· Community Engagement and Collaboration
· Deep Environmental Connection
A blend of art, nature, dialogue, and community ritual, EARTHflows offers an evolving platform for exploring the nature of ecological relationships.
EARTHflows is a creative ecological project that explores human connections with natural processes such as expansion, contraction, evaporation, and erosion. Integrating installation, site-specific research, mapping, and community collaboration provides immersive experiences that can transform environmental solastalgia—the grief associated with climate change. Helen Eberhardie Dunn’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in spiritual ecology, interdisciplinary approaches, and respectful cultural relationships with site and context. Her recent work investigates the intersections of solastalgia, ancestral healing, and ecological interconnectedness. Helen directs SkySoul Studio, an evolving art platform for creatives concerned about the environment.
'I am an installation artist who curates collaborative experiences using a modality I call EARTHFlows, involving a respectful relationship with the environment as an extension or mirror of respectful relationships with each other. EARTHFlows encompass site mapping, deep listening, immersive installations, and public and community involvement. As director of the ecological art collective Sky Soul Studio, I host a developing platform for exploring solastalgia, our grief over climate change. EARTHFlows preparation involves walking the land and mapping, community dialogue, and site-specific materials like ‘wild’ clays in liquid form, natural earth oxides, and native plants. Installations involve Projections, Collaborative Ritual performance, Action Flow Paintings, and Earth Experiments. Ritual Performances and Action Flow Paintings unite the community in improvisation, encouraging creative experimentation and active listening.'
Helen Eberhardie Dunn
Rituals - ‘actions undertaken with reverence and awareness’
Searching for new ways to work with liquid clay with reverence and awareness and to collaborate within the community, the improvisational ritual performance FlowRate at Studio 121, Colorado State University, addressed relationships with listening, time, vibration, and transitions with a curated projection and live sound. In three scenes—primordial, geological, and contemporary—fluid clay mixed with natural earth oxides was poured from the ceiling onto a giant suspended muslin canvas and the performers below. The mostly improvised performance ritual was unexpected, surprising, and energizing. The resulting Ritual Action Flow Painting was stabilized with natural copal resin, an ancient technique for stabilizing pigments. These EARTHFlow remains symbolize the flowing timelines in nature and our lives. When dried, EARTHFlows crack. Seeing the delicate, miniature cracks that form naturally within the flows is a fantastic surprise. EARTHFlow can be preserved as Ritual Action Flow Paintings. As viewers and participants, we find ourselves connected to the earth, air, sounds, and images, as well as each other, in our flow of collective real-time experience. Positive feedback on Ritual Performances is that they resonate deeply and emotionally in connection with people’s life experiences.
“These immersive experiences move us profoundly, empower us, and connect us to Earth's physicality.”
Vickie Lincoln, Workshop participant
Deep Listening – outside/inside
‘How do we experience invisible environments through sound and vibration as harmony and dissonance?’
“Deep Listening," developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary and conscious nature of hearing. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, interactive performance, and listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the external and internal sonic environment and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.”
Center for Deep Listening
I teach Performance of Self with sound healing, employing many of the modalities of Deep Listening. Deep Listening is exploratory and experimental. ' What happens when we listen with awareness to our natural environment?’ Does clay have a sound?’ Can we hear plants, and what are their songs? Earth Flows are based on locality, reverence for what is found in the natural environment, community, and collaboration.
Deep Listening is also integral to the Ritual Performance events, evolving within EARTHFlows creating and sharing new stories enriches our life experiences.
Mud Cracks
‘How do we connect emotionally and evolve conceptually through timelines of expansion and contraction like those of earth and water which we see in mud cracks?’
EARTHflows started with finding mud cracks in the culvert near our house. Mud cracks are beautiful because of their inherent form, impermanence, transience, and imperfection. Research told us that vertical stress gradients create cracks as mud solidifies, dries, and contracts. Mud cracks are geological records of time. They are evidence of the life process of clay sediment on the earth's surface and visual records of the stress of transitions. Timelines in nature can be compared to the fluctuations of experiences and emotions in personal timelines. Clay expands and contracts with evaporation and flow; expansion feels open or joyful, and contraction feels closed or fearful. Mud cracks also question perspectives on human significance within ecosystems. Listening closely, we hear the voices of wind, sun, and rain within each mud crack and see traces of life lived minutely, beetle and bird footprints. What if we could recreate mud cracks in a gallery environment and bring wildness inside to energize artificial environments that have disconnected our deeper senses? Humans are evolving in relationship to lifeless environments, and EARTHflows are offerings that reconnect and revive.
More research led to investigating what kind of earth or clay is under our feet. Local wild clay from nearby has very high iron oxide content, making it a beautiful red color. In 2023, in the ‘Cracked Earth/ Rising Blue’ installation at BloBack Gallery, Pueblo, we poured one ton of liquid local clay onto the gallery floor, planted seeds, and hand-painted a clay mural. We then observed the effects of time through evaporation, growth, and erosion throughout the month-long installation. Cracked Earth was a successful experiment. Witnessing the clay crack as the water evaporated became a powerful metaphor for solastalgia, and the community loved getting muddy! The installation evolved to include more community events, including eroding the large clay mural using water and sharing seedlings at the installation closing event.
Event Planning
Collaborative experimentation is at the heart of this work. There are a variety of possibilities for engaging the public, depending on timing, spatial opportunities, and conceptual development of the residency. EARTHflows invite curiosity about mud and introduce concepts of beauty in impermanence. Deep Listening connects people with their environment in emotionally provoking ways. ‘Ritual Earth Flows’ and sonic experiments transform personal and architectural environments, empowering and engaging critical thinking about perceptions of the environment and the arts. A ritual performance using local clay would provide a deeper connection with the region's living earth. I propose collaborative, improvisational, ritual performative events within to energize the space and the participants’ sense of connection with themselves and the natural environment. I am open to collaborating with local sound artists.
Events and Interactions:
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Earth Flow CLAY MURAL/ CRACKED EARTH WORKSHOP:
The public is invited to play with geological processes unfolding in the studio by hand-mixing liquid micaceous clay to pour EARTHflows into molds and hand-paint a clay mural. The public is invited back to observe and document the effects of evaporation on the poured clay samples and participate in the clay mural's final erosion. Concepts of time, transition, expansion, and contraction can be observed through the cracking earth and visual imprints of flow.
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Deep Listening SOUND WORKSHOP:
‘Deep Listening’ is a community event, a sonic workshop, and an interactive sound bath that introduces active listening. Active Listening is an exploratory practice that encounters personal and collective experiences of harmony, dissonance, expansion, and contraction. Harmonic and dissonant vibrations in the interior and exterior spaces will be playfully explored and recorded throughout workshops, revealing unique spatial relationships. These Sonic Ecology experiments will provide the soundtrack for the subsequent Ritual Performance events and engage the public’s interest as EARTHflow progresses.
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Inviting curiosity - TIME-BASED:
The studio space can be inviting to the public. They will witness the changes in clay through water evaporation each time they return. A slowly eroding clay mural visualizes flow, like a vertical mudbank after a rainstorm. Exploring the environment by hiking locally, we will search for dead plant specimens for their evocative forms and shadows. The mud cracks that develop within forms throughout the residency become specimens and remain to replicate nature. In ongoing sound experiments, I will respond to existing sonic ecology and use time-lapse photography to document the changes to the clay and exploratory hikes. Continuous audio and visual editing will provide material to play and project in an installation.
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Earth Flow RITUAL PERFORMANCE:
To conclude, participants in the previous workshops are invited back to perform in the EARTHflow Ritual Performance. They can collaborate in the improvisations. Liquid micaceous clay colored by various natural earth oxides will be mixed to a fluid consistency with acacia gum and poured onto the raised canvas with sonic accompaniments. The experience becomes an expansive, celebratory performance of the life of earth and water as the artist and workshop participants express the voice of the flow in sonic improvisation.
The proposed public programming aims to engage the public’s curiosity, playfulness, and environmental awareness. The workshops and performances involve deep listening, sonic ecology, water, and earth.
Goals and Intentions
‘How can I curate EARTHflows that invite more profound and intimate experiences of environmental connection?’
I seek opportunities to share EARTHflows with new communities and fresh audiences, which provides diverse opportunities and a broader scope to share these combined creative modalities. Working with inspiring new environments always benefits and oxygenates my artistic practice. Visual, sound, and media footage created will be added to the EARTHflows project archives.
I intend to continue evolving EARTHflows as a series of personal experiments, group and community collaborations, and an exhibit of remains and artifacts that can tour the Southwest. By creating a series of Ritual Performances, Action Earth Flow Paintings, and Cracked Earth Experiments rooted in geographic and cultural locality, we can curate authentic experiences that help transform environmental solastalgia and our grief related to climate change.
Exhibitions, residencies, and workshops provide momentum for an EARTHflow tour and a means to create new remains and artifacts. The upcoming exhibit, Reclamation EARTHflows at the Colorado State University Pueblo gallery planned for Fall 2025 with provide documentation of the project ongoing. Additionally, EARTHflows could tour the Southwest, originating in Pueblo, Colorado, moving to New Mexico and potentially Utah.
‘Water and earth are characterized by vibration, expansion, contraction, evaporation, and erosion; how can we connect more deeply to sustainable, connective, creative experiences to feel more alive?’
I am curious to explore the energy of New Mexico’s earth and water in the form of local clay, which has been used for centuries in the Southwest region. I am particularly interested in the art and culture of the people of the Mimbres River valley.
‘How can we evolve more vulnerable relationships with deep listening, time, and transitions by encountering primordial, geological, and momentary time?’
I plan to investigate Deep Listening more in my practice. Recent investigations into collaborative vocal harmonics have been profoundly empowering, and I want to share that experience. EARTHflows has been curated locally here in Pueblo. What if these experiences could reach a wider audience within the southwestern United States and beyond? I am discovering that my exploratory trajectory can help empower and transform the community, inspiring me to ask challenging questions.
EARTHflows
EARTHflows are site-specific. Materials are gathered respectfully from a particular physical geography and are unique in what is collected for each performance or immersive installation. The metaphors found in watching nature's circular seasons and realities compel us to create large and small rituals in our lives. This watching, comparing, and contrasting is uniquely human and ages-old, compelling feelings that resonate deeply within all of us.
Every time I work with a new event, I am astounded by the profound positive effects of sound and clay on participants and how exploring solastalgia transforms the community. EARTHflows is evolving!
"The Lakota was a true lover of Nature.. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing, and healing...”
Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux
