What does New Nature Arts even mean, anyway?!

Blog, short story, or stream of consciousness? You decide!

Hi, I’m Angel!  I’m the person who in her wildest, craziest dreams can’t really imagine anything else I’d rather be doing than wandering the Earth’s landscape, learning about the way she speaks without words, reflecting on the way time is expressed through her deepening wrinkles, imagining her original people thriving in this very place hundreds and thousands of years ago, finding the absolute most curious of things out there, gathering a few pieces and leaving the rest, photographing the big and little pictures that present themselves, making art from her greying hair and bones, sharing said art with you, and teaching you the ways that I have found deep connection with nature, however different her visage may as the years wear on. 

Thus, New Nature Arts was born.

With that being said, and after pressing the name over and over with an ink pad and the same  ramshackle rubber stamp that I’ve had for years onto brown kraft paper packaging to sell my creations at craft fairs, it reminds me that although I know what New Nature Arts means, you probably don’t.  

So are it goes!  Blog #1’s main reason for living is to explain the very simple, yet deeply personal, meaning behind the name New Nature Arts.

I love nature, creating art, and I also enjoy a good double entendre!  You’ll find all of the above in this business name.  On one hand, New Nature can speak to the earthy-nature landscape that is all around us, growing and showing us the beauty of life on planet Earth.  But this planet has been around for 4 billion or so years, so what’s so new about it, you might ask.  

Simultaneously, everything is new and nothing at all- but mostly everything!  In the way that you shed your old skin cells and have regrown all new ones every seven years, the nature that is all around us also dies, grows, and is reborn each day, just to die, grow, and be reborn again and again and again for every tomorrow that there will ever be.  There is much death and loss in this cycle, tremendous losses that ring in the ears of the most awakened and aware humans everyday.  Losses of species, losses of rainforests, losses of ice caps, losses of sovereignty, and ultimately losses of hope.

In a scientific sense, cycles of loss are necessary for new growth to have space to make their way in the world.  Consider a large towering Oak of 200 years or so that came up in life under the most optimal conditions- a seed that tumbled to just the right spot on the Earth, enjoying perfect soil composition, ample rainfall (but not too much), and a clear space where competition was manageable enough to be able to reach its leaves up to those very rays of sunshine that supported its growth for 2 long centuries.  

But time takes its toll on even the most magnificent of organisms, with various diseases, storms, and other naturally occurring phenomena weakening this Oak to the tipping point when in a recent storm, it just falls the fuck over!

And what exactly does this mean in the morning when the plants and animals who call this forest home awaken to assess the damages?  There are no human emotions attached to this loss, simply ecology fast at work.  The cycle is in full effect and so is New Nature.

The soil at the base of the tree is disturbed, pulled up by each anchoring root that has stabilized Grandpa Oak for so long, allowing a mix-up and a redistribution of minerals in this part of the forest floor.  The wood of the fallen tree will soon become food for all of the forest’s decomposers; fungi, bacteria, and invertebrates quickly set up shop to consume the wood and transform it into future nutrient-rich forest floor!  And let’s not forget about every little seed that has been sitting patiently dormant under the shade of their elder, always looking up to them, and waiting their turn.  The opening in the canopy now sends the message along each ray of sunlight that can now reach the floor that their time has come to soak up this life-giving energy and enter into the active competition of vying for survival.  Who will reach higher and taller to be a success story in the New Nature that is coming? Only time can tell what is to come.

These themes of growth and rampant destruction, competition and sudden death, life and joyous rebirth, are so ever-present in nature that if we are tuned into the spirit that moves through all things, it would be impossible not to acknowledge these themes within ourselves.  That’s the happy place where I exist.  I have always been terrible at staying at an even keel because I am so acquainted with these tumultuous themes within myself that I allow them to have their moments in my life, waves and absolute wash-outs, for better or for worse.  

One of my healthier outlets and ways I process these deep and treacherous transitions is by creating art for New Nature Arts.  You’ll find photography, jewelry, basketry, and more which proudly reflects these most unapologetic themes of life, while also celebrating and refusing to shy away from the ones that make me uncomfortable, torment and terrify me.  In my humble opinion, that’s where all the goods are hiding!

In a physical sense, New Nature also refers to the larger landscape as a whole and how she has changed through time.  The shorelines of Staten Island, where I hunt for adventures and treasures, are the same shorelines that the Lenape people cast nets to harvest oysters and clams from the Kill van Kull.  You could superimpose my footsteps on theirs, and the beach may be somewhat the same, but you cannot argue that there are so many differences that Staten Island’s original people would probably not recognize it as it appears today. 

From the trash and detritus that soils the sand, to the oil refineries across the water, to the massive shipping vessels which color the corridor, to the abandoned parts of the human-made landscape that haunt the Island’s edges, this is nature but it is a completely New Nature.  My perspective is that it is Our Nature, both in accountability and inheritance, so we have the opportunity (and obligation) to continue to love it and see its purity through its vulgarity, although it is a far cry and a pained wail from the pristine beauty that it once was.

Every piece of sea glass is a treasure drawn from our New Nature; fishing line and driftwood, corroded circuit boards and scrap metal, fish bones and invasive plants, stones and rare fossils, raccoon skulls and seagull feathers, things I pull out of my neighbor’s trash and dumpster finds, and so on and so forth- all treasure in my eyes. 

These unlikely candidates are the materials that I love to use in my New Nature creations, paying respect to the Indigenous people who survived and thrived on this land hundreds and thousands of years ago, only to be removed by people with white skin and superiority complexes.  The Lenape people sourced natural materials from the landscape to use in the crafts that made their way of life possible, based on a close relationship with the land and the desire to be a human being who makes a positive impact on the balance and health of the natural world.  Afterall, this is the landscape that generation after generation of our children will inherit and inhabit, so planning for the future is our gift to them.

Somewhere along the way, people seem to have stopped seeing a healthy future as a gift to prepare with meticulous attention and intention, and our Island’s sandy and marshy edges, upland forests, and everywhere in between show the signs of neglect, abuse, and a certainly uncertain future.  I mean, there’s a reason people only think “The Dump” when they think of Staten Island.  But even that is well on its way to being a huge NYC Park thanks to some visionaries who thankfully see even THAT transformation as a natural process. Reduce, reuse, and recycle take on a new meaning at that magnitude, but I weave the 3-R’s into everything New Nature Arts because with so much waste littered about, it only makes sense to me to reclaim it and put it to good use, while giving it new life!

There is a lot to swallow and process when pondering this very dismal reality of modern society, and it is obvious that the majority of people turn away from it because it is too painful to look in the eyes.  But for whatever reason, or many reasons that trauma has gifted me throughout my life, I am comfortable looking it in the eyes, if only to gather materials from the New Nature landscape and continue to love her just as I love myself, despite my many and well-documented pitfalls and inadequacies.  

In the very personal and human sense, New Nature Arts refers to every thing that I make which is a part of this arduous, yet necessary process of healing my wounds in parallel with healing my mother Earth’s wounds.  Our inner nature is who we are at our core, and most everyone wants to be seen as good-natured.  But things are not always as simple as that, and people certainly almost never are.  What we are from one day to the next, WHO we are, is dependent upon how we deal with varying external factors, the choices we make, and the way that we see the world.  I believe that by allowing my creativity a safe space to explore, that I am allowing myself a safe space to just be me.  This is my New Nature, a growing process which I welcome and dive right into; to be authentic and real, weird and true, honest and terrifying, woman and caretaker, and a totally fucked up work of art myself- just trying to cause less harm and damage, like an actual storm myself, everyday.

That was many words (1,545 words to be exact) all to tell you that New Nature Arts isn’t just some dumb words I linked together, but they tell you so much about how I interact with our external and my internal world , attaching all of my love to everything that I have ever created.  Because in the end, that’s the only way I know how to try to be healthy in such an unhealthy place.  I may be wrong, but it’s all I got!  I mean, we still have future generations coming up the ranks and they STILL have the right to inherit a beautiful view of Earth.

Thank you so much for reading through my actual mind.  I hope it made at least a little sense and that you come back for more!

Love, Angel