Art-Oil-Cities-Rivers-Offerings & Nicole Garneau

We knew the artist and activist, Nicole Garneau from Chicago, but got to know her more deeply during the time she spent in Europe last year both in Copenhagen and London. In London, Nicole lead the performance workshop, Art-Oil-Numbers-Bodies-Love in association with Platform London, about performative responses to the issues of oil business sponsorship in the arts.  In Copenhagen, she participated in the artist residency, Living Copenhagen. The residency looked at urban renewal issues and how to creatively interact with the city focusing on a particular area in Østerbro. 

Nicole is currently practicing a different kind of renewal at another artist residency in the US–ISLAND (Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design). ISLAND focuses on connecting art and ecology through workshops, an artist residency program, and other community enrichment activities. On their web page you can find information related to the arts as well as practical homesteading skills like how to graft fruit trees to build an orchard and how to make your own cheese. It provides a quiet retreat in the Michigan woods for writers, non-studio based artists, and musicians.

Nicole is staying at ISLAND to write her book documenting her UPRISING performance art project, which she preformed around the world from 2008-2012. In the midst of writing, she found time to make an offering to the Jordan River which runs near the residency for our daughter, Ada.

She had this to say about the process of making an offering to the Jordan River:

I was walking along the river, as I do every day, and I had been thinking about you, and Ada learning to walk, and our recent correspondence and I saw these cute little footprints in the sand and thought that maybe they could be part of an offering. So, I started looking around for other pretty things in the area and I found all these things on the ground. I liked the cedar branches because on the underside the green is quite bright, and I also liked that when I arranged them the cedar branches were sort of floating on the edge of the water and also on the sand. Then I said a prayer of thanksgiving for Ada’s first steps and blew it into the offering and took pictures.

I think of offerings as basically prayers of gratitude made manifest in a physical form. It’s fine to offer gratitude to the divine or your higher power or the earth through any form of prayer but I like taking the time to create some beautiful temporary installation or gather materials together and infuse them with the prayers. There’s something reverent about those actions to me, like giving the earth a little extra love.

I also like documenting them and using social media to spread their intention.

The story of the river offering proposes a poetic way of interacting with non-human spaces giving us freedom to connect with the natural world in unusual ways.

Thanks to Nicole for her energy, hard work, and generous spirit.