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“What does it mean to be an artist amid escalating ecological devastation?” Sitka instructor Aidan Koch asks from a place of curiosity at the start of her Environmental Comics workshop.
Koch’s question resonates. When the world is on fire, the act of art making can feel selfish and inconsequential. It is easy to feel frozen or hopeless, unsure of how individual actions or sketches in a notebook can add up to meaningful change.
This workshop spoke to me from the pages of Sitka’s summer catalog when we first published it last winter. Now on day one, seated among my fellow participants, I am even more grateful I signed up. Many of my fellow participants are comic artists and appreciators half my age who are fans of Koch’s work and discovering Sitka for the first time.
“I love comics,” shares Molly, a 25-year-old science illustrator who works in a comic shop, as we go around the room and introduce ourselves. “Drawing is my favorite thing to do.”
A wave of gratitude sweeps through me. Program Manager Maria Elting has curated such an enlivening summer season. It is a joy to welcome new instructors and next generations into this learning community.
“I’m an artist! What can I do?” Koch asks herself, with equal parts open-ended inquiry and environmental concern.
One thing Koch saw to do was to found the Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations.
“It’s really just me in the guise of an institute,” Koch confides with a wink in her voice, describing how taking action on behalf of the institute opens her up creatively. “As the leader of an institute, I need to educate myself, I need to collaborate.” Being in charge of something, she explains, helps cut through the overwhelm and think in a purposeful way about the unique power of comics to tell stories that deepen connections between humans and the non-human natural world.
“Comics engage the reader in making meaning through context and relationship,” Koch offers. “Sequences inspire connection. If you go to an art museum, you don’t assume that the paintings sharing a wall are all interrelated, but with comics, we assume the images in the sequence are all connected. This is not dissimilar… to ecology and the idea that everything in nature is connected and interdependent.”
One magic power comics have is the gift of agency. By centering nature and non-human life forms in our work instead of relegating them to human backdrops, we can give nature a voice. “If I give a blade of grass a thought bubble,” Koch shares, as if reading aloud a thought bubble over her own head, “suddenly the blade of grass has agency.”
Listening to Koch, my imagination sparks. I start envisioning my workshop experience unfolding in cartoon form.
In the first frame, I am dusting off art supplies the night before the workshop, including a fancy set of colored pencils and the last of a ream of good paper I purchased for myself over 30 years ago with prize money I won as a teenager from entering a drawing contest. The thought bubble is wistful: “I loved to draw. When did I stop?”
The second frame is drawn from above, looking down on myself in the studio, listening to Koch’s presentation, witnessing my imagination get sparked and giving myself grace. “You didn’t stop. You’re drawing in your mind right now.
Koch is right. Thought bubbles are powerful. In just two frames, my inner artist has newfound agency.
Back in the studio after the presentation, we do a warmup exercise. We divide our papers into grids of six frames, introduce a non-human character in the first frame, then pass them clockwise to a fellow student to fill in the next frame, continuing the story of the character that is passed to us.
In the group critique that follows, a fellow participant observes, “These are lovely. They are all so kind.” In one, a bird-butterfly creature lands on a human shoulder. The bird-butterfly and human affirm that each finds the other interesting, and the bird-butterfly flies off, reassuring the human that they will be remembered fondly. In another, a human enters the fourth frame and takes an active interest in a fern introduced in the first frame. In the fifth frame, the human invites, “Tell me about yourself.” In the sixth frame, the fern blushes and effervescently exclaims, “I thought you’d never ask.”
In our cartoon worlds, we imagine human and non-human life co-existing in empathetic balance.
A quote from Donna J Haraway that Koch shared pops back in my head: “Some of the best thinking is done as storytelling.”
It’s the morning of day two. I get up early to write my journal entry, pack my lunch and head out.
I can’t wait to get to Sitka and draw. It feels like a radical act.
Alison Dennis
Executive Director
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