A wave washing in and leaving. O sea, remind me to breathe. To love everything that’s passing.
A deep desire to connect lies at the heart of Lori Landau’s inter-and transdisciplinary work.
Her creative output is a documentation of presence, relationship, and attentive participation with the larger forces of nature, such as weather, atmosphere, and the elements. She believes strongly in an animist world, and is fascinated with transcribing, transmuting, transmitting, and transforming the energetic exchanges between herself and the bodies of birds, water, stones, and fields. Lori is an intentional rebel, who works to disrupt the reductive order that manifests in polarities and separation. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she is riveted on themes of place, peaceful r/evolution, freedom, and co-dreaming a more inclusive world by focusing on practices that are rooted in belonging and responsible kinship. Her writing can be found in a variety of magazines, anthologies and blogs, and her art has been exhibited in both New York City and California. Her most recent projects include writing poems for two different land trusts through Nature Culture, a portrait-drawing practice that processed her own profound personal losses during the quarantine, a poetry manuscript, What a Flower Knows, and creating art and text in community, in response to recordings of birdsong, waves and other atmospheric sounds.
on bright days,
we doused our bodies in the sea
A bird sings amid the wildflowers and something happens to my heart that has nothing to do with thinking.
Sensation as knowledge, as emotion, a word which means to be moved, stirred, agitated. In other words, to feel is to be fully alive.
how the sun lit the wild violets / The two black birds that flittered between river and rock
allow allow allow
we who have used the world with our bloated desires we who clog the ocean with our boats and garbage we who frack the land for oil so we can read in the dark we who look up at the stars and somehow still believe they are infinite.
ask a flower how to break
through the dark
turn thirst to a mouth
how to bloom despite doubt
a flower can tell you
Because of the need to sing
Because the morning is full of singing
Because birdsong is a kind of listening
Because song announces presence
Because presence proves existence
Because existence is a form of beauty
What is not transformed is transmitted.
Through an open window, the river calling
The wind sings. Something fights to beat its way out of my chest. It is a grave mistake to call the heart a muscle. It is something that cannot be tamed. Water. A snake. A bird.
drop a petal in the water and the whole sea
flowers
Lori Landau is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores consciousness, cosmology, and the relationship between form and formlessness in nature. Drawing on her long-standing meditation and poetics praxis, Lori’s work takes shape as handmade books, portraits, photography, poems, and most recently visual mapping of birdsong, waves, and other environmental phenomena. She is deeply interested in contemplative processes that explore and share somatic, intuitive, and mythological forms of knowledge, while rebelling against violence and disconnection. Lori intentionally engages with ecology, community, and deep listening practices to experience an energy exchange between the environment and her own body, mind and spirit. She holds a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Arts with a concentration in Decolonial Arts Praxis from Goddard College and is a PhD candidate in Southwestern College’s Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership program that amplifies both being and doing as ways of co-creating with nature.