Moss Studies

coppermoss | copper moss

M. Simon Levin, 2018 

Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception. All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way and a whole new world can be revealed. Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do it. Starting to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music.

[…] Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

It was 1993 and I was looking for a poetic pen name for a new (and back then it was new) email address, and frankly I was tickled by my inspiration, coppermoss@netrover.com, a mash up of installation materials I had been working with, and the dream of being a digital nomad. I harboured thoughts of greening the internet with patches of tufted viridian brilliance and intricate copper connective systems that created hyperlinks (that was what it was called back then). Thinking of them as irrigating from one patch to another, in my mind, these finely rendered copper tubes or wires weren’t like the buttons and roll overs so common in early websites, they would instead activate through drawing with your cursor. I imagined quantum leaps from one intricately delicate moss closeup to another, with the underlying coded hot spot having to be mapped below the image. It wasn’t until 5 years later that DreamWeaver would make possible these early digital visions.

In 2011, without realizing it, we bought land that matched this early vision of a virtual site for coppermoss. “Parcel D Block 4 Plan VAP12245 District Lot 3259 Land District 36” is a patchwork of dense carpeted moss covered the rock slope at the base of where a coastal fjord meets the deep waters of Sechelt Inlet. In the early days, naming this place wasn’t part of our thinking, instead we began spending time and energy clearing invasive plants off the land, restoring old building structures and generally caring for a place that had been left alone for a few years. As we worked, we began to observe the immense and wondrous worlds of the mosses covering the rocks, trees and shrubs. I felt summoned again to consider the nuances of moss as I scrambled up the steep slopes in an echo of its evolutionary journey up from the waters’ edge. I began to wonder how some of my earlier entanglements with moss needed to both be brought forward, but also transformed. After all, I was no longer confronted with the idea of moss, but with the sheer expansiveness of them - their diversity, spread, tenacity and exquisite beauty - a welcome companion during the tedious hours of outside labour.

There are over 22,000 species of moss world wide and BC hosts more of them than anywhere else in Canada. And by my completely unscientific count, there must be at least a thousand perched here in Tuwanek. Moss are curious plants - they do not have roots or any type of vascular system. Being a ‘lower plant’ and the amphibians of flora, mosses were the first plants to emerge from the salty seas to try to set ‘root’ on land. Although moss have root-like threads called rhizoids, these don’t anchor the plant patch as much as lets them communicate with their neighbours. In this place, the mosses are surrounded by cedar, fir, hemlock and arbutus trees, as well as the numerous native bushes - the salal, huckleberry, salmonberry and others. But unlike these more evolved species, moss have no cellular tissues that duct water and nutrients from beneath them. So whether living on rocks or trees, they don’t have an extractive relationship with what lies beneath. Instead, being low impact settlers, they gain all their nutrients from the air, rain and dew. When the summer heat dries them brown, they go dormant lowering their metabolism waiting for the cool moisture to fluff their green back up.

Indigenous scholar and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer in Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses writes about the seduction of studying something so small situated on such varied and less inhabitable terrain.

“There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the "dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.”

Through her storytelling, Kimmerer teaches us about the art of seeing:

“Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child's smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.”

Kimmerer inspires within me the need for a curious and trained eye that resists the complacency of only seeing an over arching green, instead searching through the tonal and formal anomalies that have been built up over long time we discover our attention. I would like to begin to follow Kimmerer’s lead to see what we can learn through the varied differences between each diminutive plant and its cousin. By looking at these tiny organisms, their size range paralleling the disparity in height between the Salal and the Douglas Fir, how can we imagine the dense forest in miniature? How could the dialects of moss encourage us to look beyond the limits of ordinary perceptions? As an artist working in primarily photographic forms, moss resists being made visible in so many ways - its smallness a challenge to the camera’s ability to hold the complexity of its miniature, rich world. The poetry of its conversation with its neighbour’s becomes flattened by its translation into digital code. I am constantly challenged to suppress my desire to represent the worlds of moss, instead seeking other ways of interfacing between us and them.

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