COLOR: Standing Out or Blending In?
Color—hue, saturation, light—pleases, dazzles, and seduces. But even when manifesting as ornament or adornment, color is more than a skin-deep composition. It is a primary source and ingredient from which flows creativity, identity, nuance, and ambience. Personal wardrobe styles, interior decor, and countless forms of artistic expression course through visual art media, with color as currency. In the wild, color is both an innate and chosen tool by which animals identify themselves, their food sources, and one another. Beyond creative expression and outdoor aesthetic, color plays a critical role in plant and animal behavior. This might be most familiar as a bright red male tanager showing off to a pale yellow female or a hummingbird’s attraction to brightly colored penstemon, but as scientists are now learning, it also includes color adaptations in response to climate change.
edible Early Winter 2024
EMBODY: Food, Fashion and Landscape
Clothing, like food, is a powerful cultural artifact that expresses values, religion, ritual, celebration, and ceremony. While both what we wear and what we eat are practical and necessary elements of everyday life, they also demonstrate who we are, where we live and what we believe in.
In my hunting practice, I honor the animals through continued connection by making use of select parts of their bodies. Bone, hair and hoof - they are more than sustenance. Today, after two days of butchering, transforming a five-hundred-pound cow elk from hoofed body into future food, I feel her remaining weight as I heave her onto the countertop, a mass of matted tawny beige and blonde, long strands of deep umber and swaths of short, dense black.
Now, her hide is ready to be fleshed and tanned. I kept her folded into a thick bundle on a wooden stool at the side of my bed through the night. I wanted her to dream me from darkness into light, as if she could be my liminal steward as I was hers when I pulled the trigger at meadow’s edge. This morning, when I carry her heavy skin from bedroom to kitchen, I ask where she grazed, what shadows the moon revealed in the timbers. I ask what to do with her coat that sheltered her through the changing seasons of her life. Her bones, too, and curved collagen hooves now rest on the portal roof as offerings to raven, vulture, sparrows and thrashers, wriggling worms and shiny, shelled decomposer beetles. “What shall your body become?” I ask her.
