When I Was the Forest There Was Nothing I Could Not Love (2019)

Bodies, trauma, instinct, nature, affect, cycles, pattern, bacterial intelligence, love, and symbiosis move together through this work.

The banners function as love poems between body and Country.

Some hold intimate bodily scales.

Others extend toward body–land scale, shaped through sensorimotor mark-making and sustained listening.

The work stays with receptivity, with the carnal relationship between body and environment, mutualism, shared history, and the slow work of return.

Karla Pringle lives and works on Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi Country and pays love and respect to Elders past, present, and emerging.

When I Was the Forest

After Meister Eckhart, 13th century

Language amended to loosen inherited binaries

When I was the stream,

when I was the forest,

when I was still the field,

when I was every hoof, foot,

fin and wing,

when I was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose,

no one ever wondered was there anything I might need,

for there was nothing

I could not

love.

It was when I left all we once were

that the agony began,

the fear and questions came,

and I wept, I wept.

And tears

I had never known

before.

So I returned to the river,

I returned to the mountains.

I asked for their hand in marriage again,

I begged, I begged to wed every object

and creature,

and when they accepted,

everything was ever present in my arms.

And the earth did not say,

“Where have you been?”

For then I knew my soul, every soul,

has always held

it within.

We the Ecosystem 2020–2021