how we think about materials

how we think about materials

At Conspire, we are paying attention to relationship. Relationship to everyone and everything around us, including materials.

First of all, we tend relationships with our ancestors, with gratitude for how they struggled to make it possible for us to be here, and with a promise to do our best to correct the mistakes that they made.  We also orient our work as an ongoing dialogue with what beloved teacher and newly-transitioned ancestor Joanna Macy (may her memory be for a blessing) called “the future ones”, the generations who will arrive in a time after we’re gone. These are the ones who will inherit the impacts of the decisions we make today, and we believe it matters to be accountable to them. 

We carry this ethos in our approach to materials, the paper, paints, brushes, glues, pigments, and other tools and supplies that we collaborate with in the creative process. In our modern globalized capitalist context, there is no purity: it is an impossible task to exist in perfect relationship to the earth in our choices of materials or anything else! But we feel that we are actually showing up for our relationship with the future ones when we try our best, when we think about what they will inherit as we make our choices, when we choose not to prioritize efficiency and financial ease over loving and forward-looking relationship.

So we source our paper, for example, from craftspeople who consider themselves participants in their immediate ecologies, who aren’t polluting local waterways or soils but instead are irrigating fields with non-toxic run-off. We look for supplies that are biodegradable, that can be returned back to the earth (or fire, or water) to be turned in a relatively short amount of time into more life. We love every pair of plastic scissors we have, we marvel at the human ingenuity that made them so ubiquitous, and we grieve the tax on the earth that the extraction of fossil fuels requires. Even our carefully-sourced papers and pigments have to travel to us by use of jet fuel. What a marvel, that our materials fly thousands of miles on the fire of ancient trapped sunlight. All of this, we bring into our work.

We strive to see, recognize, and remember. 


Our program costs reflect this thinking.

By supplementing our rigorously-sourced new materials with repurposed and salvaged materials, we hope to offer creative spaces that are financially accessible and creatively alive, bringing the living world that exists in our materials to life in ways that are entirely new. When human ingenuity meets matter, we enter an ancient and natural collaborative process where anything might emerge. Without materials, this is impossible. We do nothing alone.