Swamps and Sumi-e
Sumi-e artists throughout history have gained much inspiration and passion by focusing on their individual locales. Famous sites as well as the flora, fauna, and cultural artifacts associated with them are celebrated specifically or as composites from particular areas-- whether that be a Li River karst landscape, a farmer harvesting cabbage, children playing with crickets, or a path and pilgrims hiking up a mountain. Imitating them, my artistic vision and journey have led to celebrating local landscapes on the East coast of the United States. To a great degree, this means focusing on marshes or swamps, as they are sometimes referred to; for example, we are home to the Great Dismal swamp in Virginia and Swan Quarter’s Lake Mattamuskeet in North Carolina, places rich in history and folklore.
Some might say asking onlookers to “enjoy” the swamp landscapes might be an uphill battle. For sure, swamps are stereotypically viewed as dangerous, stinky, and evil…sinking sand, as they say. “Drain the swamp,” a familiar phrase these days, carries this negative connotation. That said, marshes, in fact, are the spaces where life begins and is sustained for many creatures. They are buffers that protect where the collision of the energy of the sea and inertia of the land negotiate and balance themselves. Pools and shallows are hiding places being just chaotic and unpredictable enough to level the playing field for prey and predator alike. Many species in the food chain find the key to viability there and some, like the oyster, give back by purifying waters that feed systems at the most basic level.
My opinion is marsh art may have a place in helping us formulate new reasons for environmental conservation. I’ll quote Curtis Badger (Salt Tide, 1993) to respond further: “We’ve been taught in our culture to avoid marshes and swamps…People distrust places where the footing is not always solid and reliable. We like dependability and certainty; we like what to expect when we put our feet down…. Such attitudes, still widely held and perpetuated in our culture, helped to bring about the destruction of hundreds of thousands of acres of marshlands in America in the last century.”
Marshes are the border zone where water batters the land and the things of man, taking back earth to be hidden beneath the flood surge, and it is rain water running away from the higher ground, energetic rivulets returning through creeks back to the ocean. In this way they buffer and protect. Marshes then are not smelly places to be avoided or “filled in” by construction teams, but a complex, and yes, sometimes smelly transitional blessing, a liminal paradox—both opportunity and destruction nest there in the dynamic edge of things.
There is a spirituality to this massive transformative adjustment that happens continuously along our coastal borders. Looking closely at the changeable water’s edge woven tight with cordgrass and cattails, it seems to vibrate as the roots of an old cypress lose their grip and the branches topple over into the flooding creek. This end for the old tree is actually fortuitous. Falling into the water, it may make a new area where the water moves more slowly, creating a shallow and then a new fertile bank that welcomes new seeds, new grasses-- a new edge.
How does this work? Suspended solids in the water fall to the bottom as the waters slow (because of irregularities along the bank) thus forming an eddy, a swirl or bar. The faster moving water nearer to the deeper part of the water course move to the opposite side cutting away at mud and soil. The result is the natural formation of a curve. These “s” curves, where the water finds balance as it flows against one side and then the opposite side of the channel, are the dynamic creek bed, but this meandering form can be an aesthetically pleasing metaphor for the swamp that finds its winding way towards buffering and mediating opposing forces—land and water.
