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| Artist Alicia Escott’s intensely humane explorations of loss, longing, commercialism and, ultimately, love (ecosalon.com) |
“The best way I can express this is that I have lost enough hope to find a new hope.” San Francisco-based artist Alicia Escott
tells EcoSalon this over coffee at The Summit, a popular cafe in the Mission
District.
She is talking frankly, not philosophically, with Sarah Ost about pragmatic
challenges of creativity and environmental issues, specifically, how one
can retain any sort of optimism, much less focus, in the face of the
enormous ecological challenges we face. (There have been six great “die
offs”; we are poised for another.)
“I heard an environmentalist being
interviewed once,” she is saying. “The journalist asked him how he was
okay with eating meat or some other destructive behavior. He answered,
something like, ‘You know, you wake up in the morning, you take a shower
then you walk around the corner to get coffee. It’s 9:00 a.m. and you have
already walked over a mountain of skulls.’”
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| A trip to the corner coffee addicts' den for a morning fix (WQ) |
...But to describe her as an environmental artist or to view her work as somehow ironic is to miss the point.
“My approach is one of a thoughtful person, not only as an
environmentalist, activist, or green advocate,” Escott says. “I am very
hesitant about labels. I think we are making mistakes, and I have a lot
of pain around these issues…but it’s really not for me to say. Us
poisoning our oceans may return us, simply, to a primordial soup.
Perhaps something better can come out of it. So my approach is
holistic.”
There are eternal, contextually unsettling and shamanistic themes in
Escott’s work. ...
“Then came rock n roll. More than anything I wish I could show
you rock n roll, you would love it, I’m sure. And there was the
telephone, and then answering machines and call waiting and then caller
id, and now you can have that with you always....”
My notebook contains this list of words I jotted down before meeting with Escott, and I share them with her.
Bereft, Buddhist, Longing, Acceptance, Human, Lonely, Heartbreak, Healing
I ask if the Buddhist tendency is intentional. I’m the first writer
to do so, and she considers it for a long moment. More
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