conscient podcast

• To go to a farm and take a carrot out that’s covered in dirt and wipe it off on your pants and eat it on the spot. It's something that most people don't have access to anymore. So that loss of contac…

• We're all going to be affected by the same outcome. When I went up to Svalbard (Norway), I went with the intention of also capturing the beauty and the terror of the reality of these changes and how …

This is an audio from a short video recorded on June 22, 2024 on an inflatable kayak outing where I thank conscient podcast listeners (and a calm presence readers) and let you know that there are man…

• I luckily managed to move from a space of ‘I have to save the planet or else’ (and we talk about that word ‘save’) to ‘I choose to commit my life to climate change in the best way I can’ because ever…

• It is taking far too long for us to acknowledge the damage we have done to the world's water and to indigenous people and to take action : truth, reconciliation, change. Scientists have discovered th…

• We essentially know two percent of all different disciplines and that kind of unknownness creates a very free playground for an artist to dance in or to draw in because we know we're going through a …

• We need culture to shift behaviour, because everything is culture but the mentality is that art is an adornment and not actually a tactic. I think art is a tactic.

I first met Annette while I was chai…

• Listening can teach us to appreciate our environment in a critical sense, but also in a kind of admiration for it. If we admire something because we think it has a depth or it has a beauty or some in…

This is a bonus episode featuring the audio version of my June 3, 2024 accept | adapt | respond posting on my 'a calm presence' Substack, whose purpose is to provide 'short, practical essays about co…

• As an artist and educator, I see that this moment calls for a way of working through decolonization and forging a path of care. I like to think of this through multispecies communities so that, as hu…

• I think there's a lot of focus on systems change and we need all of that, but what we really need is to change ourselves so that we can actually embody the world that we want to be in, so that has a …

• What would change things is love. … We ask people to act, to change, to make sacrifices, or what may be perceived as sacrifices, which in the end can turn out to be incredible things as we open up a …

• One of the roles that artists play within the poly crisis is supporting us through processes of unnumbing. Sometimes we might describe it like a re-tuning of our senses through listening. All of that…

(Note: some quotes below have been edited for concision)

• Soundwalking is always like magic. It is a magical experience. It is so simple, Hildi, as you said, and it’s as much about listening to sounds …

• How can we remind ourselves that we're all creative and we're all artists? I think that we need all parts of ourselves to be able to navigate this transition that we're in as a species and as a part …

• Community arts became my initial quest in the 1980’s as a reaction against the commercial art world. How can art participate in a functional way to connect not just art educated people, but our overa…

• The garden doesn't have to be something that's instrumental. It can be just a place where you sit, where you're thinking of growing something, you know, where the sun shines and where photosynthesis …

• What you do as an artist is crucial. Do not abandon that for a desire to serve a kind of utilitarian purpose of ‘I'm gonna make sure people know more’. The faith in knowing more is the siren song of …

• Being an artist, or making art, in the context of climate is more about being a kind of light in the darkness, making us believe in ourselves and believe in the future so that we want to endeavor to …

• Proximity proportionate responsibility: if we were to do an inventory of where all the things we own were made, that would give us a very interesting map of where our responsibility, our attention an…